Job Description

• Take your career further than you ever imagined with diverse roles and opportunities for personal and professional development.
• Work alongside diverse, passionate colleagues and leaders who inspire, support, and value your contributions.
• Our competitive benefits package includes everything from financial literacy to health and wellness initiatives, designed with your well-being in mind.

Welcome to TAL. As a leading life insurer, we’ve been protecting Australians for over 150 years. Backed by Daiichi Life, we're driven by big ambitions and empower to create better products and services.

Together with our Partners, we’re helping millions of Australians live a life filled with choices, options, and freedoms. See the direct impact you make delivering support and financial security with care and expertise. Grow beyond expectations with diverse roles, global connections, and exclusive learning opportunities.

Work with passionate, bright and capable colleagues. Feel inspired by supportive leaders. Collaborate with heart, where flexibility, wellbeing and inclusivity is valued. Together, we're reimagining insurance.

So, bring a curious mind and an ambition to help us become the progressive, digitally enabled leading insurer.

The Data Engineering Solution Architect plays a critical role in shaping and governing TAL’s modern data ecosystem, defining solution design standards, engineering patterns, and technical frameworks that enable the delivery of secure, scalable and trusted data capabilities. This position translates business, analytics and platform requirements into end-to-end data solutions, covering ingestion, transformation, storage, orchestration and lifecycle management, while leveraging cloud-native technologies and modern engineering practices.

Working across Technology, Data, Cyber, Risk and business teams, the Architect ensures data solutions align with enterprise architecture, governance and risk standards, while remaining practical and fit for purpose. Through strong stakeholder engagement and influence, the role partners with engineers, product owners and delivery teams to modernise legacy environments, enhance interoperability, and build reusable data capabilities that support reporting, analytics, operational insights and emerging AI use cases.

In this role you will:

• Define and evolve TAL’s data engineering architecture, standards and reference patterns across ingestion, storage, processing, orchestration and consumption.
• Define and maintain engineering standards for batch and real-time data movement, transformation, orchestration, observability, metadata capture and pipeline resilience.
• Lead the architectural design of TAL’s cloud-based data platform capabilities across Azure and Microsoft Fabric supporting integration services, selecting the right patterns for each use case.
• Embed governance, lineage, data quality, classification, privacy and access control requirements into architecture patterns and solution designs from the outset.
• Provide hands-on architectural guidance to delivery teams, supporting solution shaping, design assurance, estimation and technical decision-making across data initiatives.
• Build strong partnerships across Technology, business domains, Data, Risk, Cyber and strategic partners to ensure architecture decisions reflect enterprise priorities and delivery realities.

Qualifications

• Relevant tertiary qualification in information technology, computer science, data engineering, software engineering or a related discipline.
• Relevant certifications in cloud data architecture, data engineering, enterprise architecture or platform technologies (for example Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks or TOGAF) are desirable.
• Strong understanding of modern data architecture patterns, including lakehouse and warehouse architectures, medallion or layered data design, batch and streaming ingestion, and data serving patterns.
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native data services and tooling, particularly Azure data services, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, SQL-based platforms and integration technologies.
• Knowledge of data modelling, metadata management, lineage, data quality, observability, orchestration, CI/CD and platform automation practices relevant to enterprise data engineering.
• Broad understanding of data governance, privacy, security, resilience, risk and audit requirements relevant to enterprise data platforms.
• Understanding of how data platforms enable self-service analytics, data products, semantic access, operational reporting and AI/ML lifecycle needs.
• Familiarity with engineering practices such as Python, SQL, Spark, version control, testing automation and infrastructure or pipeline-as-code is desirable.

Additional Information

TAL is one of Australia’s leading life insurers, committed to inclusion, and supporting the career growth of our diverse workforce. We’re proud to be:

• An Inclusive Employer – Recognised as Employer of Choice for Gender Equality by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency from 2014 to 2025 and 2023 to 2026 Bronze Tier Status within the Australian Workplace Equality Index
• Diversity Champions – Member of Diversity Council Australia, Australian Disability Network, Pride in Diversity and Champions of Change
• Reconciliation Advocates – Read our Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan.
• We welcome applications from people with diverse experiences, perspectives and backgrounds including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, caregivers, individuals with disability/ies, people from culturally diverse backgrounds and the LGBTQ+ community.
• Need adjustments during the recruitment process? Let our team know by getting in touch with us here.—we’re here to support you.

You’re always accountable for your actions. You never give up. You strive to find the best outcomes for customers and partners. And you value working together to find the best solutions for problems. 

As part of the recruitment process, there are several checks which may be conducted to demonstrate your eligibility for a role at TAL including Criminal History, Bankruptcy, Entitlement to Work, Regulatory and Reference Checks.

#LI-Hybrid 

Everyone at TAL has a responsibility to do the right thing and is accountable for the way they conduct themselves. Our expectations are that you follow the principles set out in our Code of Conduct when you come to work every day. Risk management is everyone’s responsibility.

If you are already a TAL employee please apply via the SmartRecruiters button in Workday and navigate to the Employee Portal. This is important to ensure that your application is recorded accurately