Data Architect at Vertical Aerospace

Our Mission At Vertical Aerospace, we are pioneering the way for electric aviation. The Valo, our eVTOL (electric, vertical, take-off and landing), 'zero emissions' aircraft will set a new safety standard for how we will navigate the sky. We won't realise our mission following the same legacy processes and traditions our predecessors followed, instead, we want to 'redefine' aerospace best practices. We are growing quickly from a prototype business to a scaling SME, and the next few years will be critical to our success and delivering on our ambitious goals. Valo is targeting airliner-level safety certification in 2028 ahead of entering service with our airline and operator customers. What to Expect As a Data Architect, you will be responsible for defining and maintaining the target data architecture across the organisation. This includes how data is structured, integrated, and exposed across platforms, ensuring consistency between enterprise and time-series domains. Alongside architectural ownership, you will be expected to contribute hands-on where needed, particularly in shaping and implementing pipelines, models, and platform components. The role requires balancing longer-term architectural direction with practical delivery, working closely with data engineers, BI developers, and software teams to ensure solutions are both well-designed and delivered effectively. What You’ll Do - Define and maintain the target data architecture, covering data platforms, data models, and integration patterns - Design and govern scalable data models for both enterprise and time-series data, ensuring consistency and reuse - Establish standards for data modelling, transformation, and pipeline design across analytical and operational use cases - Work closely with data engineering teams to ensure pipelines align with agreed architectural patterns and support downstream analytics - Contribute hands-on to the development of pipelines, models, and data platform components where required - Define how data is exposed through semantic layers and BI tools to ensure consistent metrics and definitions - Support integration of data across systems, including engineering, test, and enterprise platforms - Identify and reduce fragmentation in data sources, pipelines, and reporting outputs - Contribute to platform and tooling decisions, ensuring alignment with long-term architectural goals while remaining practical to deliver - Embed best practices in data quality, lineage, and governance within the architecture and its implementation What You’ll Bring - Strong experience in data architecture, with hands-on data engineering experience in a complex, data-rich environment - Proven ability to design scalable data models and architectures, and support their implementation in production systems - Deep understanding of modern data architectures, including cloud platforms, data lakes/warehouses, and pipeline design - Experience working closely with data engineering teams, and contributing directly to delivery where needed - Strong knowledge of data modelling techniques (e.g. dimensional modelling, normalisation, time-series considerations) - Familiarity with both structured enterprise data and high-volume time-series data environments - Experience defining semantic layers, metrics, and data structures for analytics and reporting - Ability to balance long-term architectural integrity with short-term delivery needs - Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to align technical and non-technical teams around common standards What can you expect from us? We're on a mission. Where others see limits, we see opportunity, and we work at pace. Working at Vertical isn't your average role but for those seeking a challenge, a flexible, supportive organisation and an incredible team; working here is an opportunity to do the best work of your career. Our approach promotes ingenuity and courage, while our environment builds success through diligence in safety and being open in the way we work. The only way we're going to assure the next chapter of aviation history is by working as a team, relentlessly, towards our goal.  Our benefits Our people matter - we're not going anywhere without them. Which is why our company benefits go beyond the essentials. - 26 days holiday, plus bank holiday - 5 extra days per year to buy (or sell) - 5 extra days holiday when you get married or enter a civil partnership - Additional 4% of your salary to spend on extra benefits - Award-winning digital health and wellbeing service (Help@Hand) - Company performance based bonus - rewarding company and individual performance - Company Share Scheme - open to every Vertical employee - Company Pension Scheme - 5% and we match it - Breakfast on us, every day We may just be the hardest job you've ever had, but we're confident it will be the most rewarding. Join the team today and help us shape the future of Advanced Air Mobility. Disclaimer Statement We encourage you to apply even if you may not have all the experience listed in the advert. We recognise that talent comes in various forms and we are committed to providing opportunities that create an environment of growth, diversity, and inclusion for everyone. As part of our desire to review and make our processes fair, we may ask you questions related to these aspects during the application process. For more information on how we will use your data, see our Legal section.