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Job Details

Position Summary

The Principal Data Architect is responsible for designing, governing, and optimizing the enterprise data architecture that supports analytics, operational data needs, AI/ML capabilities, and strategic business objectives. This role ensures data is structured, integrated, secured, and governed in a way that maximizes usability and value across the organization.

As a key contributor within the Data, Analytics & AI Architecture and Strategy Office, you will set architecture direction, create reusable patterns and canonical models, and guide multi‑domain, cross‑platform implementations. You will partner with executives, product leaders, data engineering, analytics, security, and data governance teams to modernize the data ecosystem (e.g., lakehouse, data mesh/fabric, streaming, data products), shorten time‑to‑insight, and enable AI/ML at scale. You will own critical architectural artifacts, proof‑of‑concepts, and reference implementations for mission‑critical initiatives, and mentor architects and engineers across the organization.

This role is instrumental in establishing the building blocks of the organization’s data ecosystem—data domains, data products, semantic layers, metadata frameworks, and data quality controls—while helping evolve the organization toward modern patterns such as data fabric, data mesh, and cloud‑native lakehouse platforms.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities

Data Architecture & Modeling

• Conduct current‑state assessments and define transition architectures to reach the target state with measurable milestones and risk mitigation.

• Own conceptual, logical, and physical data models across enterprise domains.

• Establish standards for data modeling, canonical data definitions, and metadata structures.

• Define modeling patterns (e.g., 3NF, dimensional/star, Data Vault, wide tables/Delta, semantic/metrics layers) and enforce consistency.

• Partner with data engineering to implement data models in modern cloud platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery).

• Ensure lineage, metadata, and data contracts are designed and documented to support interoperability and governed data sharing.

• Ensure consistent, reusable, and scalable data structures aligned to enterprise data strategy.

Data Platform & Integration Design

• Architect data ingestion, transformation, storage, and distribution patterns aligned with platform capabilities.

• Define best practices for data architecture across batch, micro‑batch, and streaming use cases.

• Evaluate and recommend data platform technologies for lakehouse, data warehouse, data lake, and operational data stores.

• Optimize data storage and processing for performance, cost, and scalability.

• Guide implementation teams on data structures, partitioning strategies, indexing, and schema design.

Data Governance, Quality & Security

• Partner with governance to operationalize data ownership/stewardship, policy enforcement, PII/PHI protection, and compliance.

• Collaborate with governance teams to define data policies, data contracts, and stewardship models.

• Define data quality SLAs/SLOs, validation rules, trust scores, and observability practices (schema drift, freshness, lineage, anomaly detection).

• Architect security-by-design (RBAC/PBAC/ABAC, column/row‑level security, masking, encryption, key management) across cloud and on‑prem environments.

• Integrate governance tooling (e.g., Collibra, Purview ) with catalogs, lineage, and policy management.

• Ensure data definitions, lineage, classifications, and business context are documented and visible.

Standards, Patterns & Reuse

• Publish and maintain architecture patterns, blueprints, guardrails, and decision records (ADRs) to drive consistency and reuse.

• Lead design reviews and architecture councils, ensuring adherence to standards, NFRs (performance, reliability, security), and cost targets.

• Curate a library of data product templates, quality checks, and integration accelerators.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Translate complex architectural concepts into clear business nar