Solutions Consultant
£130,000 – £160,000 / yr base salary
Posted 20 May 2026
Advertised as “Senior Solutions Consultant - xLake: Data & AI Platform”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 8+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Hybrid
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | £130,000 – £160,000 / yr |
|---|
About the Role: We are looking for a Senior Solutions Consultant with deep knowledge of Enterprise Data & AI Platforms and a strong AI Fluency, Data Observability & Governance.
You'll be the principal technical owner of xLake Platform (xLake Overview) deployments - responsible not just for standing up the platform, but for guiding a customer's infrastructure, security and database teams to the right architectural decisions, and for making those decisions stick in environments where security and change control are non-negotiable.
This is a hands-on role with a consultative position. You'll be equal parts architect, engineer and trusted advisor: designing the target-state cluster, executing the build, and translating hard technical trade-offs into terms a customer's stakeholders can act on. You are the person the customer relies on to get a secure, scalable platform right the first time.
What we look for:
- Own cluster architecture and deployment. Lead end-to-end deployment of Acceldata ODP managed via Apache Ambari. Define cluster topology - master, slave and client node placement - sized to the customer's workload and infrastructure.
- Prepare and harden infrastructure. Advise on and execute OS-level prerequisites on RHEL or Ubuntu: password-less SSH, DNS/NTP, firewall (iptables) rules, SELinux and PackageKit handling, and system tuning such as umask and open file descriptors.
- Deliver secure and air-gapped deployments. Design and implement installations inside firewalled and air-gapped data centres using local mirror repositories or trusted HTTP proxy servers, working within the customer's change-control and compliance constraints.
- Integrate backend databases. Provision and configure operational databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL/MariaDB), including schemas, users and JDBC drivers for core services - Ambari, Hive, Spark, Ranger and Schema Registry.
- Extend the ecosystem via mpacks. Install, configure and troubleshoot components through Ambari Management Packs - Spark, Kafka, Flink, NiFi, Ozone, Airflow, Trino, ClickHouse, JupyterHub and MLflow.
- Implement enterprise security. Stand up cluster security end-to-end: Kerberos integration, Apache Ranger authorization policies, SSL/TLS certificate management, LDAP/AD integration, and secure credential handling (e.g. obfuscating LDAP bind passwords via the Ambari Credential Store / JCEKS).
- Advise and enable the customer. Run working sessions with the customer's infrastructure, security and DBA teams; document target-state architecture and handover runbooks; and coordinate with Acceldata engineering and account teams to unblock issues and drive long-term adoption.