Highly Experienced Data Solutions Architect Needed

We are seeking a highly experienced and skilled Senior Data Architect to join our team.

The successful candidate will have 9+ years of experience in data architecture, backend engineering, and DevOps, including leadership of a team or end-to-end ownership of large, multi-stakeholder projects.

Key Responsibilities:

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

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• 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

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have):

• 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.)

Engagement Details:

• Duration: 10+ months (extension/full-time possible)
• Schedule: Flexible, with overlap for key meetings across time zones
• Mode: Remote; available for virtual collaboration and on-call windows as agreed