Lead Architect, Data & AI Platforms

London, United Kingdom

About WPP Media

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. With exceptional talent, trusted data and intelligence, and world-class partnerships – all united by our pioneering agentic marketing platform, WPP Open – we help clients navigate change, capture opportunity, and deliver transformational growth.

WPP Media is WPP's AI-driven media operating unit, bringing together media, data, and partnerships to deliver creative personalization at scale. Connected through WPP Open and powered by Open Intelligence, clients see exactly where, how, and why their media investment is working.

For more information, visit wppmedia.com.

About Choreograph: A Leading WPP Media Brand

Choreograph is WPP’s global data products and technology company. We’re on a mission to transform marketing by building the fastest, most connected data platform that bridges marketing strategy to scaled activation.

We work with agencies and clients to transform the value of data by bringing together technology, data and analytics capabilities. We deliver this through the Open Media Studio, an AI-enabled media and data platform for the next era of advertising.

We’re endlessly curious. Our team of thinkers, builders, creators and problem solvers are over 1,000 strong, across 20 markets around the world.

About the Position

We are hiring a Lead Architect to own the technical design of Azure-first data and AI platforms. You will define the reusable patterns, reference architectures and end-to-end solution concepts that our delivery teams build from, and prove them in code rather than in slideware.

This is an engineering-first, developer-architect role: roughly 70–80% designing solutions, building and packaging reusable patterns, and prototyping new concepts in code, and 20–30% client-facing advisory.

As a senior technical authority, you will bridge client strategy with hands-on code, setting the reference architecture and proving it yourself, then partnering with the Data Engineering, Platform/DevOps, Security and Client Delivery teams who industrialize it into resilient, self-service, cost-effective and compliant delivery at scale. Replacing traditional IT operations and manual governance with modern software automation, you will mentor engineers, review code/IaC, and own key technical decisions and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Lead Azure-First Platform Architecture: Architect and implement Azure data platforms for clients, including landing zones, networking, identity, and data platform services (Azure Data Lake Storage, Synapse, Databricks), extending patterns to AWS or GCP where a client estate requires it.
• Design & Build Data Pipelines: Design, Implement key data ingress patterns across data platforms. Key focus would be Azure Data Factory pipelines and data flows for ingestion, transformation, and orchestration; establish patterns for parameterization, retries, and error handling to meet pipeline SLAs, then work with the Data Engineering team to scale those patterns into production delivery.
• Implement Modern IaC & CI/CD: Design, implement key IaC patterns. Deliver infrastructure-as-code using Terraform; create reusable modules and policy-as-code guardrails. Establish repo strategies, branching, pull requests, multi-stage pipelines, approvals, and automated promotion gates.
• Package Reusable Solutions: Turn proven designs into packaged, deployable assets (Terraform modules, pipeline templates, reference implementations and accelerators) with the documentation and worked examples delivery teams need to reuse them across clients.
• Architect for AI & DataOps: Introduce DataOps practices (automated unit/integration testing, data quality checks) and build the AI layer on top of it: vector search, RAG workflows and agentic capabilities.
• Prototype & Showcase New Concepts: Build working prototypes of new data and AI concepts (RAG, agentic workflows, streaming and real-time patterns) and demonstrate them to clients to shape demand, test feasibility and de-risk delivery before a full team is committed.
• Client Advisory & Technical Leadership: Own the technical relationship with client and agency stakeholders. Run discovery and design workshops, present at design authorities, and translate commercial objectives into phased roadmaps, costs and trade-offs that a non-technical audience can act on.
• Ship Secure-by-Default Controls: Codify private endpoints, managed identities, Key Vault-backed secrets, RBAC, network isolation, data encryption and Purview cataloging/lineage as reusable modules, so security ships with the platform rather than being applied afterwards.
• Optimize Performance & Cost (FinOps): Optimize compute and storage across Spark clusters, autoscaling, partitioning, and serverless options; track, report, and drive cloud cost savings.
• Observability & Reliability: Build monitoring into pipelines and platforms using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, and define the SLOs and alerting the owning engineering team runs against.
• Guide Event-Driven Architectures: Lead streaming and micro-batch patterns (Event Hubs, Kafka on Azure, Structured Streaming) where required by client use cases.
• Enable the Data Engineering Team: Mentor engineers, review pull requests/IaC, and hand over patterns and accelerators in a state the Data Engineering team can run with, so larger builds are delivered by the team rather than bottlenecked on you.

Requirements

• Hands-on Developer-Architect experience: Proven track record in cloud platform and data engineering, with deep expertise in Microsoft Azure and hands-on exposure to AWS and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Production IaC Fluency: Strong proficiency in Terraform applied with a software engineering mindset (reusable modules, testing, modular code structures).
• Data Platform Core: Hands-on experience with Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, and Azure Databricks (Spark).
• CI/CD Mastery: Strong CI/CD experience using GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps for both IaC and data workloads.
• Software Engineering Fundamentals: Solid coding capability in Python and SQL; performance tuning for Spark/Databricks; data modelling for analytical and AI workloads.
• Evidence of Shipped Work: Able to walk through data platform code, Terraform modules or pipelines you have personally authored. Shortlisted candidates will be asked to talk through their own code and design decisions at interview.
• Patterns Adopted by Others: Examples of reference architectures, reusable modules or accelerators you have designed, packaged and had adopted by teams other than your own.
• Client-Facing Advisory Skills: Demonstrated ability to consult directly with senior client and agency stakeholders, including non-technical business audiences, present pragmatic technical solutions, and lead architectural workshops unaided. You will be the technical voice in the room, not supported by a separate engagement lead.
• Security as Code: Ability to implement VNets, private endpoints, managed identities, Key Vault, RBAC and governance patterns as Terraform, rather than through portal configuration or change-request processes.

Nice to Have

• Production experience shipping RAG or agentic AI workloads to live users (vector databases, LLM orchestration frameworks).
• Event-driven architectures with Event Hubs, Kafka, Stream Analytics, or Functions; CDC patterns.
• Lakehouse/Delta patterns on Databricks; MLflow and feature store awareness.
• Data quality tooling and frameworks (Great Expectations, Deequ) and dbt for transformation governance.
• Data Governance: Experience tracking data lineage, defining data quality policies and procedures, and enforcing them at runtime.
• API Management, Logic Apps, or Azure Functions integration experience.
• Experience with Azure Enterprise-Scale Landing Zones and Azure Policy.
• Relevant certifications: Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Data Engineer Associate, or AWS / GCP equivalents. Certifications are welcome but are weighted below demonstrable evidence of shipped code.

We Offer

• Competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision, and dental insurance
• Significant paid time off
• Preferential partner discounts
• Employee mental health awareness days
• Opportunities to grow within the global WPP Media & WPP networks
• Variety of employee resource groups and frequent in-office events

About the Company

WPP Media is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.

We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.

Please note this is a UK based role and requires individuals to have the right to work in this location

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