Distinguished Data & Integration Architect (Dallas/Austin)

Overview

At PowerSchool, we are a dedicated team of innovators guided by our shared purpose of powering personalized education for students around the world. From the central office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool supports the entire educational ecosystem as the global leader of cloud-based software for K-12 education. Our employees make it all possible, and a career with us means you’re joining a successful team committed to engaging, empowering, and improving the K-12 education experience everywhere.

Team Overview

Our Information Technology (IT) team leads all aspects of IT systems and processes across the enterprise, including data services, security, compliance, applications, automation, and end-user services. Through innovative and streamlined technology solutions, this dynamic team enables company growth​, protects data, and serves as a critical partner to all departments of PowerSchool.

Responsibilities

Description

The Distinguished Enterprise Data & Integration Architect serves as the company’s most senior technical authority on enterprise data strategy, integration architecture, and data governance. This role sets the long-term architectural vision for how data moves, is stored, governed, and consumed across the organization—and ensures that vision directly enables business strategy, product innovation, analytics, and AI capabilities.

This is a visionary leadership role that combines deep technical mastery with enterprise-wide strategic influence. The Distinguished Architect operates as a trusted advisor to executive leadership and shapes cross-functional technology decisions throughout PowerSchool.

 

Key Responsibilities

 

Enterprise Strategic Leadership

• Serve as the principal technical advisor to the CTO/CIO and executive leadership team on all matters related to data strategy, integration architecture, and enterprise data platforms.
• Define and own the enterprise-wide data and integration architecture vision, ensuring alignment with company-level business strategy, product roadmap, and growth objectives.
• Drive technology strategy decisions that extend beyond the data ecosystem, influencing platform direction, build-vs-buy decisions, and technology investment priorities at the enterprise level.
• Present architectural vision, risk assessments, and technology investment recommendations to executive leadership and, where appropriate, to the board.

 

Enterprise Integration Architecture

• Own and evolve the enterprise integration architecture spanning ERP, CRM, HR, and SaaS systems, setting the strategic direction for how the company’s systems ecosystem interconnects.
• Establish enterprise-wide integration standards, patterns, and principles (batch, near-real-time, event-driven) that other architects and engineering teams execute against.
• Provide architectural governance and oversight for large-scale integration initiatives (e.g., Workday implementations, M&A system integrations), ensuring alignment with enterprise standards.
• Define non-functional standards for error handling, logging, monitoring, retry logic, and performance that become organizational defaults.

 

Data Platform Architecture

• Own the target-state data platform architecture vision using Microsoft Fabric and related Azure services, setting the multi-year roadmap for the company’s data infrastructure.
• Establish architectural principles for landing zone patterns, transformation layers, and modeling standards that engineering teams implement.
• Ensure data platform strategy supports scalable, cost-effective designs that enable analytics, AI/ML, and product innovation.
• Drive alignment between data ingestion pipelines and enterprise integration architecture to eliminate redundancy and technical debt.

 

Data Governance Architecture

• Define and champion the enterprise data governance framework and operating model, establishing this as a strategic capability rather than a compliance exercise.
• Establish data domains, ownership, stewardship, and metadata standards at the enterprise level, influencing cross-functional adoption.
• Set the strategic direction for governance tooling (e.g., Microsoft Purview) including lineage, catalog, and classification, ensuring governance is embedded into platform and integration design from inception.

 

Organizational Influence & Technical Leadership

• Lead the enterprise architecture review board (or equivalent), establishing architecture principles and standards that all technical teams adhere to.
• Mentor and develop senior architects and technical leads across the