Role Profile

As a Data Architect at Actica, you will have the opportunity to provide support to a wide range of high-profile UK public sector and defence organisations. Your help will enable them to get the maximum benefit from their technology investments, and in doing so, play a key role in nationally critical projects which make a real difference to people’s everyday lives.

With expertise in translating business requirements into technology requirements and defining data standards and principles, the data architect will be responsible for visualizing and designing a client's enterprise data management framework and providing advice and designs relating to data analytics solutions. The architect should be able to provide advice on planning, specifying, enabling, creating, acquiring, maintaining, using, archiving, retrieving, controlling, and purging data as part of supporting a series of client-side engagements. The data architect will also guide the creation of standard common business vocabularies, express strategic requirements and outline high-level integrated designs to meet those requirements, and be able to align these with enterprise strategy and related business architecture.

This role will require you to lead assignments and be responsible for supervising direct reports whilst ensuring the overall success of the engagement.

Our position as a client-side advisor means that your role will involve significant stakeholder engagement, dealing directly with the client, including in resolving day-day issues involved in assignment delivery and developing follow-on opportunities, so excellent interpersonal and influencing skills are essential.

Career Development

You will be given the opportunity to further your career in consulting, specialising in the application of a broad range of methodologies and technical specialisations to a wide range of business problems.

A career mentor will be on hand to provide support and guidance throughout your journey with Actica. You will also work with a performance and development manager who will conduct reviews to set career objectives and identify training courses which are both relevant to your current project work, and aligned with your planned career progression.

Responsibilities:

Working either individually or as part of a larger Actica team, you will undertake a number of consultancy assignments that could include:
• Creating genuinely useful outcomes to help deliver client goals in major business transformation programmes;
• Hands-on analysis, not just assurance, including working with clients, users and other team members to address issues before they become blockers;
• Translating business requirements into technical specifications, including data streams, integrations, transformations, databases, and data warehouses;
• Defining the data architecture framework, standards and principles, including modelling, metadata, security, reference data such as product codes and client categories, and master data such as clients, vendors, materials, and employees;
• Defining reference architecture, which is a pattern that others can follow to create and improve data systems;
• Defining data flows, i.e., which parts of the organization generate data, which require data to function, how data flows are managed, and how data changes in transition;
• Collaborating and coordinating with multiple departments, stakeholders, partners, and external vendors.


Qualifications and Experience:

We work predominantly within the UK Defence and Public Sectors so experience within those sectors is desirable, preferably within the ICT context on enterprise solutions. The fast-moving nature of the ICT environment, together with the need to resource multiple, ad-hoc assignments, also requires our consultants to be quick thinkers, proactive and self-motivated - with the ability to apply a structured approach to often unfamiliar subject matter.

The following attributes and areas of experience will make you particularly suited to this role with Actica:

• Data architecture and modelling;
• Cloud analytics platforms e.g. relevant Azure platform services;
• Data visualisation tools e.g. Power BI, Qlik Sense;
• Data science approaches and tooling e.g. Spark;
• Data engineering approaches;
• Government Digital Service approaches including the Government Service Design Manual and the Service Standard;
• Enterprise or Solution architecture development using a recognised framework e.g. TOGAF;
• Business or systems analysis methods and tools, e.g. BPMN, UML;
• Software development methods and techniques e.g. Agile methods such as SCRUM;
• Public sector best practice guidance, e.g. ITIL, OGC tookit;
• Business case development to Treasury guidelines.


The nature of Actica’s business means that a wide and varied background is preferable and the capability to adapt quickly to change is always required.

You might not feel that your skills precisely match the requirements of this job specification; however, we encourage you to apply if this is a role that appeals to you. We require individuals with a broad skillset, so there may be other aspects of your experience which are equally important to us, but that are perhaps not listed in the role specification above.

Actica aims to nurture a diverse workforce through inclusive working practices, promoting equality in our recruitment activities, and by employing candidates on the basis of merit. Discrimination against individuals on the grounds of protected characteristics is not permitted and we take steps to ensure that our staff are made aware of their legal responsibilities when making hiring decisions.

We are keen to improve diversity within our organisation and the industries in which we work, and hope to employ individuals who share that view.


While Guildford is our home base, consultants typically spend their time working remotely. For most clients, consultants spend 2-3 days working remotely and 2-3 days co-located with colleagues at a client’s site or our office in Guildford. For some projects, there will a requirement to work up to 5 days a week co-located with colleagues. All work is team based, with a high level of engagement with other Actica and client team members. Consultants are encouraged to get involved in internal activities and to attend company team events whenever possible.

Candidates must be eligible and willing to gain UK Security Clearance to apply for this position.