Principal Data Architect

Employment Type: Regular Full-Time

Position Overview

As a Principal Data Architect, you will serve as the enterprise technical leader driving the vision, strategy, and governance of our cloud-native, serverless data architecture. This is a high-impact, forward-looking role where you will define standards, mentor senior architects, and work directly with executive leadership to shape data strategy and innovation. You will leverage deep expertise in AWS, data lakes, and modern analytical platforms like Snowflake and Dremio to architect and scale mission-critical platforms. Your work will influence how we design, secure, and deliver data at scale across business units, ensuring alignment with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and our organizational objectives.

Key Responsibilities

🧭 Enterprise Strategy & Leadership

• Define and lead the enterprise data architecture roadmap aligned with company-wide business and technology strategy.
• Champion cloud-native, serverless-first, and event-driven architectures that scale globally and securely.
• Provide technical thought leadership on data lake architecture, data mesh, Zero ETL, and multi-cloud strategies.

🏗️ Platform Design & Governance

• Own the reference architecture for enterprise-scale data platforms using AWS (S3, Glue, Lake Formation), Snowflake, Dremio, and data lake table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake).
• Establish and maintain enterprise standards for data modeling, schema evolution, metadata management, lineage, and observability.
• Drive platform-wide decisions on infrastructure as code, serverless orchestration, and data pipeline frameworks.

🤝 Cross-Functional Influence

• Partner with engineering, product, security, and compliance leaders to ensure data platforms support real-time analytics, ML/AI, and regulatory needs.
• Present architecture proposals and strategic initiatives to senior executives and technical governance boards.
• Mentor Senior and Lead Data Architects, enabling growth of architectural capability across the organization.

🚀 Innovation & Technology Evaluation

• Lead the evaluation, POC, and adoption of emerging technologies (e.g., data mesh, GenAI data stack, lakehouse evolution).
• Publish internal architecture papers, host knowledge-sharing sessions, and contribute to the broader architecture community.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in data architecture, cloud platform engineering, or related technical leadership roles.
• Expert-level knowledge of AWS cloud architecture with a focus on serverless, data lakes, and distributed systems.
• Proven experience architecting enterprise-grade data platforms with Snowflake, Dremio, or similar technologies.
• Demonstrated success applying the AWS Well-Architected Framework, especially in analytics-heavy domains.
• Mastery of infrastructure-as-code principles, preferably with AWS CloudFormation or CDK.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence at the executive level and guide enterprise-wide architecture direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty and/or AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.
• Deep understanding of data governance, access control models (e.g., row/column-level security), and compliance frameworks (e.g., HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR).
• Experience driving data modernization efforts or cloud data migrations for Fortune 500 or global-scale organizations.
• Background in architecting data platforms for machine learning and advanced analytics workloads.
• Published architecture blogs, conference talks, or open-source contributions in the data space.

Company Information

(Company information not provided in the original description)