Description
Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, helping people of all ages make progress in their lives through education. We deliver high-quality content, assessments, and digital services to learners, educators, and institutions globally.
Our Team is responsible for the delivery of nearly 4 million examination results per annum, including A-Level, GCSE, BTEC and T-levels for students in UK and International centres. Our in-house systems process every learner from registration to marking and certification, in a highly regulated business. We currently operate a hybrid estate of predominantly bespoke systems, with an ongoing strategic transformation programme to migrate from on-prem to cloud based, cost effective, scalable, and resilient services.
About the Role
As a Lead Specialist Data Architect at Pearson, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of data across the Pearson Qualifications (PQ) enterprise. You will define, own, and govern the enterprise data architecture for a portfolio of transformation platforms, ensuring coherence from source through integration, data distribution, and operational use.
You'll lead the creation of enterprise data models and standards that underpin new digital services and platforms. This role focuses on operational enterprise data modelling, integration architecture, and event-driven data distribution. Working closely with business stakeholders, architects, developers, and suppliers, you will define scalable and interoperable data structures, integration patterns, and architecture standards that support PQ's future operating model.
Key Responsibilities:
- Define, own, and evolve the enterprise data architecture vision, principles, and standards for transformation platforms.
- Act as data architecture design authority, approving or challenging architectural decisions across teams.
- Lead the design of operational enterprise data models, including core business entities, relationships, lifecycle states, and canonical structures used across platforms.
- Define and govern conceptual, logical, and physical data models for transformation initiatives.
- Design and guide integration architectures, event-driven data distribution, and messaging patterns across systems.
- Ensure consistency of data structures, message contracts, and integration patterns across platforms.
- Work closely with developers, integration engineers, and architects to refine designs before build and deployment.
- Provide architectural governance and assurance across internal and supplier-led initiatives, reviewing data models, integration designs, and architecture outputs, identifying risks, driving improvements, and supporting the transition of technical ownership into internal teams.
- Ensure data architecture supports resilient integration patterns including retries, dead-letter handling, observability, replay, and recovery capabilities.
- Ensure compliance with data governance, regulatory, residency, and sovereignty requirements.
Required Skills and Experience:
- Proven experience acting as a Data Architect or Solution Architect within complex, multi-system environments.
- Strong expertise in operational and transactional data modelling, including the design of core business entities, relationships, lifecycle states, and canonical representations used by enterprise applications and services.
- Experience defining enterprise data models, architecture standards, and integration patterns adopted across multiple business domains.
- Strong understanding of integration architecture, distributed systems, messaging technologies, and event-driven design, including experience designing event-driven solutions.
- Experience operating within architecture governance frameworks and influencing senior stakeholders, suppliers, and delivery teams.
- Understanding of resilient integration and messaging patterns including retries, dead-letter handling, replay, schema evolution, and observability.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to translate complex business requirements and data structures into clear, actionable designs and architecture standards.
Highly Desirable:
- Experience delivering enterprise integration platforms, Technical Hubs, Integration Hubs, shared data services, or MDM platforms.
- Experience designing operational data models supporting end-to-end business processes such as customer and centre onboarding, qualification and product catalogue management, assessment delivery, learner registration and bookings, eligibility, grading, awarding, certification, or similar domains.
- Experience with Azure technologies including Azure Service Bus, Azure SQL, Azure Data Factory, and Azure-based integration solutions, together with experience of messaging platforms such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, EventBridge, or similar technologies.
- Experience working within large-scale transformation programmes involving multiple platforms and suppliers.
- Familiarity with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and modern cloud architecture practices.
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