- Company Name
- Belgian Defence
- Job Title
- Data Architect – Defense | Enterprise Data Architecture | Security‑Driven Design(M/V/X)
- Job Description
-
**Job title:** Data Architect – Defense
**Role Summary:**
Lead the design, governance, and future‑proofing of the Ministry of Defense’s enterprise data architecture. Define principles, build scalable secure data platforms, and ensure alignment with national security and digital transformation objectives.
**Expectations:**
- Master’s degree or higher in IT or related field.
- 5+ years as Data Architect, Senior Data Modeler, or Solution Architect in complex environments.
- Proven expertise in relational and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, ETL/ELT, APIs, and cloud migration.
- Strong knowledge of data modeling tools (SPARX, ERwin, ER Studio, PowerDesigner).
- Experience in data governance, metadata management, and master data management.
- Excellent analytical, communication, and stakeholder‑management skills.
- Fluency in English; bilingual (Dutch/French) preferred.
- Eligible for Belgian or EU nationality.
**Key Responsibilities:**
- Define and champion enterprise data architecture vision, principles, and standards.
- Design secure, scalable data platforms (data warehouses, lakes, integration layers).
- Lead creation and maintenance of conceptual, logical, and physical data models; ensure consistency, reusability, and quality.
- Collaborate with business analysts, domain experts, data engineers, solution architects, and DBAs to convert requirements into architectural blueprints.
- Drive data governance initiatives: quality, lineage, classification, stewardship.
- Architect ETL/ELT, streaming, and API pipelines that guarantee secure data flows.
- Support modernization: cloud adoption, legacy migration, MDM implementation.
- Evaluate and integrate new technologies and methodologies to strengthen defense data capabilities.
- Partner with cybersecurity teams to embed data protection and risk mitigation into all designs.
**Required Skills:**
- Enterprise data architecture & strategic alignment.
- Data modeling, database design (SQL & NoSQL).
- Data warehousing, pipeline engineering (ETL/ELT, streaming).
- Data governance, metadata management, MDM.
- Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and modernization concepts.
- Strong analytical, problem‑solving, and communication.
- Ability to influence cross‑functional teams.
**Required Education & Certifications:**
- Master’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or equivalent.
- Certifications in data architecture or modeling (e.g., Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate, AWS Certified Data Analytics, TOGAF).