About the role
We’re looking for an experienced Data Architect to manage our Enterprise Data Architecture and Snowflake Governance. The ideal candidate will have specialist knowledge of Snowflake platform design and governance along with expert technical skills to establish and own the ‘Bestway Data Vault’.
About Bestway
Bestway Group is a diversified multinational family owned business with annualised turnover in excess of £4.5 billion. Starting off as a chain of retail convenience stores, the Group has grown to become a diversified multinational business with interests across the wholesale, pharmacy, real estate, cement and banking sectors. The Group is also the largest overseas investor in Pakistan.
Owned by the Pervez, Choudrey and Sheikh families, Bestway Group was founded in 1976 by Sir Anwar Pervez OBE H Pk, who remains Chairman. Serving over 12 million customers and employing over 28,000 individuals, the Group supports and serves communities through its operations across the UK, Pakistan and the Middle East.
Responsibilities:
- Establish and own the 'Bestway Data Vault' and Semantic Layer standards. Define Group-wide Star Schema patterns, Snowflake object hierarchies, and modelling conventions that enable the Data Engineering team to deliver repeatable, high-quality data products.
- Design robust integration patterns for heritage systems (AS400, iSeries, and legacy SQL DBs) into Snowflake. Ensure the architecture supports incremental loading, data reconciliation, and auditability as required by the Engineering team.
- Architect cross-cloud and internal data pipelines using Kestra and Snowflake native features. Design patterns that ensure idempotency, error handling, and high-throughput connectivity between AWS S3, Azure APIs, and Snowflake.
- Define the end-to-end security and access model (RBAC). Establish policies for dynamic data masking, row-level security, and environment separation (Dev/Test/Prod) that align with GitHub-based CI/CD workflows.
- Lead the architectural effort to optimize Snowflake credit spend. Identify high-cost query anti-patterns and design warehouse scheduling and clustering strategies to ensure performance scales with business growth.
- Architect data structures specifically for LLM/GenAI consumption—including vector search optimization, embedding pipelines, and metadata-rich semantic views to support agentic AI initiatives.
- Partner with Business Analysts and Engineering to define 'Data Contracts'. Establish automated data quality frameworks (using dbt tests/expectations) to ensure the 'Single Version of Truth' is maintained across the platform.
The Ideal Candidate:
- 10+ years in Data Engineering or Architecture, with 4+ years of deep Snowflake specialization. Proven track record of moving organizations from "legacy/manual" to "modern/automated" data states.
- Expert knowledge of Data Vault 2.0, Kimball (Star Schema), and Inmon. Ability to decide the right pattern for specific retail/wholesale use cases.
- Advanced proficiency in dbt (Data Build Tool) and GitHub. Familiarity with Kestra or similar modern orchestrators is highly desirable.
- Strong understanding of AWS (S3/IAM/PrivateLink) and Azure API integrations within a Snowflake context.
- Strong belief in "Data-as-Code." Experience designing CI/CD pipelines for data and enforcing engineering rigor across a decentralized team.
- A "Technical Enabler" mindset. Ability to translate complex architectural standards into clear guidance for Engineering Managers and Developers.
Benefits:
- Competitive salary
- Pension
- 22 days annual leave, plus bank holidays
- Onsite parking
- Life assurance
We understand that no applicant ever ticks every box so please do consider applying should some or most of the above apply. Bestway Group is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity and inclusion. We welcome people of different nationalities, backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We want strong, and diverse teams built from talented individuals with different backgrounds identities and experiences.
If this is of interest to you and you would like to learn more, please do get in touch, we are looking forward to hearing from you.
