Director Data Architect - Wealth Management

Established Financial Services is ramping up on AI and wants to grow their technical data platform team within one of their business lines. Their new Data Architect will lead onshore and offshore resources and will drive business engagement with multiple decision makers from the wider Data and IT departments.

What you’ll do:

1) Data & AI Architecture Strategy

• Define the target-state architecture for data, analytics, ML/AI, and GenAI capabilities across the organization.
• Translate business and product needs into scalable architectural blueprints, reference architectures, and solution patterns.
• Establish architectural standards for interoperability, reusability, performance, cost management, and reliability.

2) Data Platform & Data Product Design

• Architect modern data platforms (e.g., lakehouse/warehouse) including ingestion, storage, processing, metadata, lineage, and observability on Microsoft Azure
• Drive data modeling standards (conceptual/logical/physical), domain-oriented design, and data product thinking.
• Enable governed self-service analytics and data sharing while maintaining strong controls and auditability.

3) AI/ML & GenAI Solution Architecture

• Design ML/AI architectures covering feature stores, training pipelines, model registries, deployment patterns, and monitoring.
• Define GenAI architecture patterns including RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), embeddings, vector databases, prompt management, and evaluation frameworks.
• Ensure models and AI services meet requirements for latency, availability, scalability, explainability, and maintainability.

4) Security, Governance, and Responsible AI

• Partner with Risk/Compliance/Security to implement controls for data privacy, encryption, access management, retention, and regulatory requirements.
• Embed Responsible AI principles: fairness, transparency, human oversight, model risk management, and traceability.
• Implement governance processes for dataset certification, model approvals, and lifecycle controls.

5) Cloud, DevOps, and MLOps Enablement

• Define CI/CD patterns for data pipelines and AI solutions; establish automated testing and release processes.
• Build MLOps standards for model versioning, monitoring, drift detection, incident response, and rollback.
• Optimize cloud architecture for cost, performance, resilience, and operational excellence.

6) Stakeholder Leadership & Architecture Governance

• Lead architecture reviews, provide technical direction, and mentor engineers and data scientists on best practices.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects to align with broader IT strategy and integration patterns.
• Influence vendor/technology selection through PoCs, tradeoff analysis, and technical evaluation.

What you’ll bring:

• 10 to15 years’ experience as a Data Architect with proven and recent projects within large Enterprise data platform
• Strong architecture experience across data engineering + AI/ML (ideally in the same role).
• Proficiency in Azure or AWS and its data/AI services.
• Deep understanding of:

Data ingestion (batch/stream), transformation, orchestration, and performance tuning

Lakehouse/warehouse concepts, data modeling, and data governance

ML lifecycle: training, validation, deployment, monitoring, drift, retraining

GenAI patterns (e.g., RAG, embeddings, vector search), evaluation, and guardrails

• Ideal Hands-on knowledge of:

SQL + a programming language (Python preferred)

CI/CD and IaC (e.g., Terraform/Bicep/CloudFormation)

Containerization and/or orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes)

• Ability to communicate complex architecture clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proven experience influencing design decisions and driving standards across multiple teams.
• Strong problem-solving mindset, with a pragmatic approach to tradeoffs and delivery

Location: Hong Kong – Permanent role

Salary budget: HKD 110 to 135k/month + bonus

Start date: April/May 2026

Interview process: 4 rounds

Interested by this description? Please reach out to me over email - paris.herard@robertwalters.com.hk to know more.