Lead AI Data Engineer

Lead AI Data Engineer – Azure | Fintech AI Lab

Location: Abu Dhabi

My client is looking for a Data Architect to join a newly established AI Lab. This is a key role responsible for designing the data architecture, platforms and foundations that will enable the bank to scale AI, analytics and data-driven products.

The ideal candidate will be a strong Azure-focused Data Architect with deep hands-on experience designing modern enterprise data platforms and a solid understanding of how data architecture needs to support AI, machine learning, analytics and GenAI workloads.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the enterprise data architecture supporting AI, analytics and data products.

• Design scalable, secure and high-performance Azure data platforms and architectures.

• Develop modern data lake, lakehouse and data warehouse architectures.

• Define data ingestion, integration, transformation, storage and consumption patterns across the organisation.

• Work closely with Data Engineers, Data Scientists, AI Engineers, Software Engineers and Product teams to ensure data platforms support production AI use cases.

• Establish standards for data modelling, data governance, data quality, metadata, lineage and security.

• Design architectures supporting both structured and unstructured data, including data required for GenAI and RAG applications.

• Provide architectural direction across real-time, batch and streaming data workloads.

• Assess emerging Azure and data technologies and determine their suitability for enterprise adoption.

• Ensure architecture meets banking requirements around security, privacy, regulatory compliance, resilience and scalability.

• Help establish the technical foundations and standards for the new AI Lab.

Azure Technology Stack

Strong experience across the Microsoft Azure data ecosystem is essential, ideally including:

• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

• Azure Data Factory / Synapse Pipelines

• Azure Synapse Analytics

• Microsoft Fabric and/or modern lakehouse architectures

• Azure Databricks

• Azure Event Hubs / streaming technologies

• Azure SQL / Cosmos DB

• Microsoft Purview

• Azure security, networking and identity services

• Azure AI / Azure OpenAI and data architectures supporting GenAI and RAG

Ideal Candidate

• 10+ years experience across Data Architecture, Data Engineering or Enterprise Data Platforms.

• Strong track record designing large-scale enterprise data architectures.

• Deep practical experience with Azure data technologies and cloud-native architecture.

• Strong understanding of data lakehouse, data warehouse, data mesh and modern data platform patterns.

• Experience with large-scale data integration, ETL/ELT, batch and streaming architectures.

• Strong knowledge of data modelling, governance, lineage, quality and security.

• Experience designing data platforms to support AI/ML and GenAI workloads.

• Strong understanding of cloud architecture, APIs, microservices and distributed systems.

• Experience within banking, financial services, fintech or another highly regulated environment would be highly advantageous.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with both senior stakeholders and highly technical engineering teams.

What Will Differentiate You

My client is looking for a hands-on, technically credible Data Architect, rather than someone purely focused on governance or high-level documentation.

The strongest candidates will have a deep Azure technical foundation, have personally designed modern data platforms at scale, and understand how to build the data foundations required to support AI, analytics and GenAI in a banking environment.

This is an opportunity to join the AI Lab at an early stage and play a significant role in defining the data architecture and technology standards that will underpin its future AI capabilities

*** Only successful candidates will be contacted ***