Building and operating platforms. You design, provision, and harden cloud data platforms end to end, covering storage and compute, networking, security and IAM, observability, and cost. You codify infrastructure using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation and establish governance frameworks such as data catalogs, data contracts, RBAC models, and SLAs that let organisations scale data access without losing control. You build platforms that multiple teams and business domains can rely on, not just at launch, but as they grow.
Shaping the data architecture. You design logical and physical data models, map data flows and lineage across systems, and make the structural decisions that determine how data is organised, integrated, and consumed. This can mean designing a target-state architecture for a client migrating from legacy systems to a modern cloud lakehouse, or defining domain boundaries and data product interfaces in a data mesh adoption.
Advising and translating. You sit at the intersection of technology and business. You work with data engineers, data scientists, product owners, and senior client stakeholders to understand what they need, then turn that into platform strategy and architecture decisions. You are the person a CTO trusts to make the right call on how their data infrastructure should evolve.