Freelance Data Architect (Snowflake)

Employment Type: Independent Contract Hours: 40 hours per week Duration: At least 6 months Level: Mid to Senior Experience Required: 4-5+ years relevant experience Location: 100% Remote (Must be located in the United States) Salary: $150,000 - $190,000 USD (Annual Pay Range)

Position Overview

The Motley Fool is seeking a highly skilled Freelance Data Architect specializing in Snowflake to join our Data Democratization, Governance & Strategy team. This role is crucial for leading the strategic development and evolution of our enterprise data platform, ensuring its scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency. You will work collaboratively with a Platform Engineer and Data Governance Specialist to maintain a secure and well-governed Snowflake environment.

About The Motley Fool

The Motley Fool is a purpose-driven financial services company dedicated to making the world smarter, happier, and richer. For 30 years, we have provided transparency, education, and "Foolish fun" to help people make better investment decisions. We are a fast-moving, collaborative team that values high-quality work, curiosity, and initiative, driven by the impact our work has on people's financial futures.

Team Mission

The Data Democratization, Governance & Strategy team focuses on making data accessible and actionable for all business end-users. We specialize in transforming warehouse data into easily consumable formats, building data structures that support seamless reporting and valuable business insights through collaboration with third-party vendors and stakeholders. Our partnerships with business analysts and data engineering enable every team at The Motley Fool to leverage data for informed decisions and strategic growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead Snowflake platform architecture across U.S. and International instances, ensuring alignment to medallion-layer principles and scalable data modeling.
• Define best practices for data structures, modeling, object naming, and compute utilization.
• Partner with the Data Engineering team to guide schema design, improve performance, and promote consistency.
• Drive cost optimization efforts through query and data structure performance optimization.
• Represent the Snowflake platform in strategic projects, including migration and enterprise analytics initiatives.
• Collaborate with a dedicated Platform Engineer to implement and maintain Git-based version control, metadata documentation, and object lifecycle standards.
• Mentor engineers and analysts on Snowflake best practices and performance tuning.
• Participate in governance efforts, architecture reviews, and cross-functional collaboration.

Requirements

• 7+ years in data engineering or architecture roles.
• 3+ years of hands-on Snowflake experience.
• Expertise in data modeling, SQL performance tuning, and Snowflake architectural principles.
• Strong proficiency in SQL.
• Working knowledge of Python.
• Experience with compute monitoring, cost control, and resource optimization in Snowflake.
• Familiarity with GitOps or CI/CD workflows in a data platform setting.
• A collaborative mindset and effective communication skills for both technical and business audiences.
• Familiarity with ETL processes and tools (e.g., Airflow) and data pipeline optimization.
• Self-motivated with a proactive approach to identifying and implementing optimizations.

Application Instructions

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