The Role

As a Lead Data Architect at Zühlke, you will take full ownership of designing and delivering scalable, practical data platform solutions for our clients. You will bridge the gap between high-level architecture and hands-on implementation, ensuring that what you design is robust, buildable, and delivers real value.

How you'll make impact

• Own the Architecture: Design end-to-end data architectures and strategies for customer projects, ensuring solutions are practical, scalable, and deliverable.
• Lead the Technical Team: Provide technical leadership, review designs, solve complex problems, and ensure day-to-day decisions align with the overall architecture.
• Engage with Customers: Run workshops, design sessions, and architecture reviews with stakeholders, becoming a trusted technical advisor.
• Support Pre-Sales: Contribute to pre-sales and proposal work by scoping technical effort, validating estimates, and providing technical substance for bids.
• Stay Close to Implementation: Remain hands-on with code, Databricks, or your preferred cloud platform to ensure your designs are realistic and effective.
• Bring Structure to Delivery: Apply agile, DevOps, and DataOps practices, and make architectural decisions based on lakehouse concepts, data mesh, governance, and security.
• Grow the Team: Mentor engineers, share knowledge, and help raise the technical bar across projects and the wider data engineering practice.

What's important to us

• Proven Architecture Experience: You have designed and delivered data platforms for real customer projects, understanding practical trade-offs and production realities.
• Consulting Mindset: You can structure ambiguous problems, facilitate workshops, and translate business needs into clear technical direction.
• Deep Technical Skills: Hands-on experience with Azure and/or AWS, lakehouse architectures, distributed processing, data modeling, containerization, and data governance. Experience with Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow) is a strong plus.
• Leadership by Example: You take responsibility for technical direction, make informed decisions, and communicate your reasoning clearly.
• Commitment to Quality: You care about clean, maintainable systems that remain understandable and extensible over time.
• Excellent Communication: You can explain technical decisions to engineers and business outcomes to stakeholders, in both German and English.
• Educational Background: A degree in Computer Science or a comparable technical field.