Azure Data Architect

Sr Data Architect with Banking & Financial Services (BFSI) expertise explicitly should have integrated domain-specific skills into both the technical and strategic areas:

Role Overview

A Senior Data Engineer & Architect specializing in Azure Data Lake who also brings deep banking and financial services (BFSI) experience. This professional design and governs secure, large-scale data platforms while aligning with the unique compliance, risk, and business intelligence needs of financial institutions.

Core Technical Skills

Azure Data Lake & Storage

> Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2): Hierarchical namespaces, partitioning strategies, performance tuning.

> Delta Lake / Lakehouse: ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and versioning for regulatory accuracy.

> Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers with lifecycle management for cost-effective storage of historical financial data.

Data Ingestion & Processing

> Azure Data Factory (ADF) & Synapse Pipelines for batch/stream ETL.

> Azure Databricks (PySpark/Scala) for risk analytics, fraud detection, and large-scale transaction processing.

> Event Hubs / Kafka for real-time ingestion of trading, payments, and transaction data.

> Stream Analytics for monitoring AML (Anti-Money Laundering) or fraud events in near real-time.

Data Modelling & Strategy

> Dimensional Modeling for regulatory & financial reporting.

> Data Vault 2.0 for scalable enterprise banking systems.

> Reference Data & Master Data Management for customer, product, and account consistency.

> Bronze/Silver/Gold layers for regulatory-certified data sets.

Governance, Security & Compliance

> Microsoft Purview for lineage, cataloging, and classification of PII & PCI data.

> RBAC, ABAC, and Azure AD Integration to meet banking segregation-of-duty policies.

> Encryption (at rest/in transit), HSM/KMS, tokenization for PCI DSS & SWIFT compliance.

> Regulatory reporting alignment: Basel III/IV, IFRS, MiFID II, Dodd-Frank, GDPR.

Banking-Specific Data & Analytics

> Credit risk & market risk analytics pipelines.

> KYC (Know Your Customer) & AML data integration.

> Fraud detection models deployed on Azure Databricks.

> Data lineage and traceability to support audit, compliance, and regulators.

> Customer 360 & financial product analytics for digital banking transformation.

Strategic Responsibilities

• Data Strategy for BFSI
• Define enterprise data lake governance with strict compliance for financial audits and regulators.
• Enable regulatory-grade reporting pipelines with traceability and non-repudiation.
• Support real-time analytics for fraud monitoring, transaction surveillance, and liquidity management.
• Architecture Leadership
• Design resilient, compliant, and cross-border architectures for global banks.
• Architect data sharing platforms for Open Banking (PSD2, API ecosystems).
• Guide risk data aggregation (BCBS 239) strategies.
• Collaboration
• Work closely with compliance officers, risk managers, and regulators.
• Partner with treasury, wealth management, retail, and corporate banking units for domain-specific use cases.

Tools & Ecosystem Knowledge

• Azure Native: ADLS Gen2, Synapse, Databricks, Purview, Event Hubs, Power BI.
• Banking Data Platforms: FIS, Temenos, Finacle, Calypso (integration into Azure).
• Risk & Analytics Frameworks: SAS, Moodys, Bloomberg APIs integration.
• Data Quality: Great Expectations, Monte Carlo for regulatory-grade assurance.
• Security & Compliance: PCI DSS, SWIFT, SOX, GDPR, MAS TRM (Singapore), RBI FREE-AI (India).