Strategic Projects Lead transforming strategies into actionable plans for our clients. Driving data - driven approaches and cross - functional collaboration in a flexible work environment.
About the role
- Data Strategy & Architecture Lead at EXL focusing on data strategy across Banking, Insurance, and Healthcare sectors. Leading consulting engagements that create value-driven data roadmaps with strategic leadership.
Responsibilities
- Lead consulting engagements that assess maturity, define target-state architectures, and design value-driven data roadmaps.
- Work closely with Architecture and Technology capability teams, translating business goals into actionable blueprints that drive modernization, self-service analytics, and trusted data foundations.
- Combine strategic leadership with deep architectural understanding to enable clients to accelerate digital and AI transformation through strong data design principles.
- Operate in a flexible home-office/hybrid model, with periodic travel to EXL offices, client sites and industry events.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, or 12–15+ years of relevant experience in data management, architecture, and consulting.
- 10+ years of professional experience in data and analytics, including architecture or solution design for enterprise platforms.
- 3+ years of experience in Banking or Financial Services (preferred); Insurance and Healthcare experience a plus.
- Outstanding presentation and communication skills with executive audiences.
- Strong understanding of cloud-based data architectures (e.g., lakehouse, data mesh/fabric, MDM, and data integration).
- Experience leading data platform modernization initiatives and aligning them with business value outcomes.
- Demonstrated ability to bridge strategy and architecture — translating vision into technical blueprints.
- Prior consulting or consultative experience required.
- Architecture certifications (TOGAF, cloud architect) a plus.
- Deep knowledge of data and solution architecture principles, including integration patterns, APIs, data virtualization, and cloud-native components.
- Proven ability to design or lead definition of target data platform architectures across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
- Working familiarity with leading tools across the ecosystem (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, Synapse, Collibra, Informatica, Alation, Kafka).
- Strong facilitation and advisory skills to drive architectural consensus among executive and technical stakeholders.
- Ability to synthesize strategy and architecture deliverables into clear business cases and transformation roadmaps.
- Strong organizational skills to manage multiple dependencies across short (6–12 week) consulting engagements.
- Demonstrated aptitude for mentoring peers and advancing architectural literacy across the consulting team.
- Creative, analytical thinker able to adapt to evolving data and AI landscapes.
- Provide day-to-day leadership and guidance to engagement teams composed of solution architects, data governance leads, analysts, and SMEs.
- Set engagement goals, provide feedback, and contribute to formal performance evaluations.
- Over time, may manage direct reports within the Data Strategy capability.
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