The big data revolution began when the volume, velocity, and variety of data completely overwhelmed the systems used to store, manipulate and analyze that data. As a result, a new class of software systems emerged called big data systems. While many attempted to harness the power of these new systems, it is estimated that approximately 75% of the big data projects have failed within the last decade. One of the root causes of this is software engineering and architecture aspect of these systems. This paper aims to facilitate big data system development by introducing a software reference architecture. The work provides an event driven microservices architecture that addresses specific limitations in current big data reference architectures (RA). The artefact development has followed the principles of empirically grounded RAs. The RA has been evaluated by developing a prototype that solves a real-world problem in practice. At the end, succesful implementation of the reference architecture have been presented. The results displayed a good degree of applicability with respect to Quality factors.