Senior Data Systems Architect

We are seeking an experienced Senior Data Systems Architect to lead the design and implementation of our data platforms. As a key member of our engineering team, you will be responsible for architecting and implementing scalable, reliable, and secure data systems that meet the needs of our business.

• Key Responsibilities:
• Design and implement data pipelines and architectures that meet business requirements
• Lead a small squad or workstream, scope milestones, manage dependencies and risks, unblock engineers, communicate status to stakeholders, land outcomes on time
• Define target states and data contracts, make build/buy calls, author RFCs, drive cost/performance guardrails and reliability patterns
• Design, build, and operate reliable batch and change-driven pipelines, schedule/orchestrate jobs, handle schema evolution and failures gracefully
• Implement clean, tested merge/transformation pipelines, produce models that are easy to consume for products and analytics, tune SQL for performance
• Build or collaborate on APIs for data access/updates, design request/response contracts, handle auth (OAuth2/OIDC/JWT), idempotency, validation, and auditing
• Provision/manage cloud resources with Terraform, automate build/test/deploy with CI/CD, write solid shell scripts for glue/ops tasks
• Instrument logs/metrics/traces, define SLOs and on-call runbooks, lead incident reviews and drive root-cause prevention
• Apply least-privilege access, secrets management, and encryption in transit/at rest, partner on compliance requirements
• Champion unit/integration/data-quality tests (including SQL), enforce code health via reviews, linters, and CI checks
• Operate async-first, produce concise docs (data contracts, mappings, runbooks, RFCs), collaborate closely with product/engineering/analytics across time zones

• Proven leadership: led engineers or owned large, multi-team projects; comfortable running design reviews and giving actionable feedback
• Strong SQL (tuning, indexing, query plans) and solid RDBMS fundamentals (e.g., Postgres, SQL Server, MySQL)
• Python for data work and services; comfortable with shell scripting (bash preferred; Powershell acceptable)
• Terraform and IaC fundamentals; CI/CD experience (version control workflows, automated tests, environment promotion)
• Cloud: Azure preferred (storage, compute, identity, monitoring). If not Azure, very strong AWS background
• Data integration: Ingestion (batch + change-driven), orchestration, schema/versioning, resilient retries/replays
• Workflow orchestration: Prefect preferred (flows/deployments, retries/backoff, scheduling, observability); Airflow/Dagster also acceptable
• APIs & auth: REST patterns, pagination, validation, rate limiting, OAuth2/OIDC/JWT
• Observability: Logs/metrics/traces and actionable alerts/dashboards
• Testing mindset: Habit of writing tests for code and SQL; fixtures/test data; CI
• Communication: Clear written/verbal comms; practiced cross-timezone collaboration
• AI tooling: Ready to use Claude Code (and similar assistants) to accelerate work—while exercising judgment and writing your own code/tests

• Experience mentoring, interviewing, onboarding, and raising code quality standards
• Regulatory/compliance awareness (e.g., data protection or public-sector standards) and how it impacts design/operations
• Analytics exposure (dim/fact modeling, BI consumption patterns)
• Data platform architecture exposure (storage/layout choices, catalog/lineage, governance concepts)
• Familiarity with Kafka, streaming/message queues, and columnar formats (e.g., Parquet)
• Experience with cloud monitoring stacks (Azure Monitor/Application Insights, CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)