Lead Data Architect

Founded in Switzerland in 1968, Zühlke is owned by its partners and located across Europe and Asia. We are a global transformation partner, with engineering and innovation in our DNA. We're trusted to help clients envision and build their businesses for the future – to run smarter today while adapting for tomorrow’s markets, customers, and communities. Our multidisciplinary teams specialise in tech strategy and business innovation, digital solutions and applications, and device and systems engineering. We excel in complex, regulated spaces including health and finance, connecting strategy, tech implementation, and operational services to help clients become more effective, resilient businesses.

If you share our values and want to do the best work, for the right reasons, we can offer you the chance to do it on a global scale and play a real role in shaping our exciting journey.

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.

What we offer

• Work life blend: we offer a safe & healthy workplace, with flexible working hours and, depending on client needs, the option to work from home up to three days per week
• Profit share scheme: In addition to your annual salary, you may receive a profit share defined by the company’s success in the previous year
• Global and Diverse Zühlke community: witness how colleagues from all our 16 offices across the globe come together to create a unique, positive and inclusive work culture, learning from one another at annual team camps, and celebrating year-end parties and other local festivities.
• Committed to development: we are committed to the growth of our people and are investing in your development. We’re empowering you to build the skills you need to make a positive impact, both personally and for our clients, today and in the future.

To dive deeper into local benefits of working in Zühlke follow the link

If you feel you don't meet all the requirements, we are still happy to get to know you, learn more about your ambitions and ideas and look forward to receiving your application!

We welcome people from all backgrounds, regardless of their gender, personality, national origin, race, religion, colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, disability or veteran status.