Specialist: Data Architecture at Absa Group Limited

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

The Data Architect is responsible for designing, governing, and optimizing the data architectures that enable analytics, operational systems, regulatory reporting, and enterprise data platforms within the bank. The role focuses on defining end-to-end data design - spanning ingestion, storage, modelling, transformation, distribution, and consumption - ensuring that solutions are scalable, secure, compliant, and aligned with enterprise standards.

The Data Architect works closely with information architecture, data engineering, business units, and solution architecture to deliver data solutions that power high-quality insights, enable advanced analytics, and support mission-critical banking processes.

Job Description

1. Role Purpose 

The Data Architect is responsible for designing, governing, and optimizing the data architectures that enable analytics, operational systems, regulatory reporting, and enterprise data platforms within the bank. The role focuses on defining end-to-end data design - spanning ingestion, storage, modelling, transformation, distribution, and consumption - ensuring that solutions are scalable, secure, compliant, and aligned with enterprise standards. 

The Data Architect works closely with information architecture, data engineering, business units, and solution architecture to deliver data solutions that power high-quality insights, enable advanced analytics, and support mission-critical banking processes. 

Data Architecture Design 

• Develop conceptual, logical, and physical data architectures supporting operational systems, analytics, and regulatory reporting. 
• Design end-to-end data flows including ingestion, transformation, storage, integration, and output models. 
• Define data models, schemas, and structures aligned to enterprise information architecture and canonical models. 
• Create architecture blueprints, data pipeline designs, and integration patterns (e.g., streaming, batch, event-driven). 
• Ensure data solutions meet NFRs including performance, reliability, scalability, and security. 

Platform & Solution Enablement 

• Collaborate with platform teams to shape the bank’s cloud and on-prem data platforms (e.g., data lakehouse, MDM, metadata catalog, streaming). 
• Guide data engineers on best-practice patterns for ETL/ELT, distributed processing, storage optimization, and schema evolution. 
• Influence the selection and configuration of data processing frameworks, and tooling. 
• Support BU-aligned delivery teams by translating business requirements into robust data architecture designs. 

Governance, Standards & Quality 

• Ensure data architectures comply with enterprise standards, data governance requirements, and regulatory obligations (POPIA, AML/KYC, retention policies). 
• Establish and maintain standards for data modelling, data lifecycle management, lineage, and monitoring. 
• Promote the adoption of reusable data assets, common data domains, and golden sources. 
• Participate in solution reviews, architecture governance forums, and design assurance activities. 

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement 

• Partner with Information Architects, Solution Architects, Business Architects, Data Engineers, and Analysts to drive coherent end-to-end solutions. 
• Engage with business stakeholders to understand domain context, ensuring data requirements are reflected accurately in technical designs. 
• Serve as a trusted advisor to BU teams on data-related design decisions. 

Innovation & Future-State Architecture 

• Contribute to the definition of the bank’s data architecture target state, focusing on modernization, simplification, interoperability, and automation. 
• Advocate modern data concepts: data products, federated domain-oriented data ownership, event-driven integration, and open table formats (Parquet/Iceberg). 
• Evaluate emerging technologies and propose evolution paths for the bank’s data ecosystem

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