Solution Architect (Manchester)

Insight Investment is looking for a Solution Architect to join the Data Platform team in Manchester. This is a hands on, delivery focused role responsible for designing and implementing pragmatic, scalable solutions on top of Insight's Snowflake based Data Platform hosted in Microsoft Azure. Joining an established Data Platform team in the early stages of growing out solutions in Snowflake, the role focuses on turning platform intent and capability gaps into real, production ready implementations that can scale with the organisation.
Sitting between Platform Architecture, Data Architecture, and delivery teams, the Solution Architect ensures that enterprise data management capabilities such as metadata management, lifecycle governance, auditability, and operational resilience are embedded into solutions from the outset. This is a delivery adjacent role with accountability for ensuring platform capabilities are not just well designed, but usable, supportable, and actively adopted as the Snowflake platform matures.
Role Responsibilities

Design and deliver scalable, production ready solutions that address platform capability gaps and business requirements, aligned to Snowflake on Azure and compliant with end to end SSDLC and enterprise technology change policies
Define and maintain reference architectures, solution patterns, and exemplar implementations to support adoption, ensure architectural transparency, and enable consistent use across teams
Work hands on with delivery teams to validate and implement solution designs, acting as a technical authority on Snowflake and advising on appropriate best practice approaches
Guide teams in selecting solution approaches that balance performance, maintainability, operability, and cost, improving the data engineering experience through reusable components and clear guidance
Shape platform capabilities for both technical and non technical users, including Front Office financial services end users, through low code, configuration led, or metadata driven solutions where appropriate
Contribute to the evolution of end to end data management capabilities, embedding discovery, governance, lifecycle management, operability, resilience, auditability, and observability into solution designs by default
Collaborate with architects, platform, security, and operations teams to ensure solutions meet production readiness, compliance, and assurance standards, and align with enterprise data governance, security, privacy, and audit expectations
Engage with delivery teams, data stewards, and subject matter experts to ensure solutions align to overall platform direction and contribute to continuous improvement and communities of practice

Strong, hands on experience with Snowflake, including core capabilities such as warehouses, tasks, streams, snowpipe, semi structured data handling (variant type), file formats and stages, and platform features like RBAC, time travel and cloning
Strong SQL skills, including performance aware and Snowflake optimised query design and features such as materialized views
Knowledge of snowpark, or transferable knowledge from other dataframe based frameworks such as PySpark
Experience implementing batch data ingestion pipelines using technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Openflow or similar
Experience delivering data solutions on Snowflake hosted in Microsoft Azure
Practical understanding of how data solutions must align with enterprise concerns such as security, identity, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code, working effectively with platform and cloud engineering teams
Able to take ambiguous requirements and translate them into practical, production ready solutions
Strong understanding of how design decisions impact delivery speed, operability, cost, and governance
Comfortable making and explaining architectural trade offs in a delivery context
Works confidently across engineers, architects, Front Office users, and governance stakeholders, bridging strategy and delivery
Communicates complex technical concepts clearly and pragmatically
Brings empathy and an enablement mindset when working with delivery teams, supporting adoption and change
Outcome focused and delivery minded, able to work hands on where needed while maintaining a platform level perspective