Senior Data Architect

Our story

At Alight, we believe a company’s success starts with its people. At our core, we Champion People, help our colleagues Grow with Purpose and true to our name we encourage colleagues to “Be Alight.”

Our Values:

Champion People – be empathetic and help create a place where everyone belongs.

Grow with purpose – Be inspired by our higher calling of improving lives.

Be Alight – act with integrity, be real and empower others.

It’s why we’re so driven to connect passion with purpose. Alight helps clients gain a benefits advantage while building a healthy and financially secure workforce by unifying the benefits ecosystem across health, wealth, wellbeing, absence management and navigation.

With a comprehensive total rewards package, continuing education and training, and tremendous potential with a growing global organization, Alight is the perfect place to put your passion to work.

Join our team if you Champion People, want to Grow with Purpose through acting with integrity and if you embody the meaning of Be Alight.

Learn more at

About the Role – Senior Data Architect

As a Senior Data Architect on our Global Data & Advanced Analytics team, you will be the visionary and designer of our data ecosystem. You’ll leverage your expertise in AWS cloud-native technologies and big data platforms to build scalable data solutions that empower advanced analytics and AI-driven products. This is a senior role for a hands-on leader who can both strategize at the enterprise level and dive into technical design.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure our data architecture is robust, secure, and aligned with business needs, enabling Alight’s mission to provide insightful, real-time solutions in health, wealth, and human capital.

Responsibilities:

Design and Strategy:
Work with data architecture team to define data architecture blueprints for our products, including data flow diagrams, system integrations, and storage solutions. Continuously refine the architecture to meet evolving business requirements and to incorporate new AWS capabilities and industry best practices.

Cloud Data Platform Development:
Lead the development of our cloud-based data platform on AWS. Implement data pipelines and warehouses using AWS services – e.g., AWS Glue for ETL, AWS Lambda for serverless processing, Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, and S3 for data storage.

Big Data & Legacy Integration:
Oversee the ingestion of large-scale datasets from various sources (transactional systems, APIs, external files). Optimize processing of big data using Spark and integrate legacy Hadoop-based data into our AWS environment.

Data Modeling:
Develop and maintain data models (conceptual, logical, physical) for our databases and data lakes. Design relational schemas and dimensional models that cater to both operational applications and analytical workloads. Ensure data is organized for easy access and high performance (for example, optimizing Redshift schema design and using partitioning or sort keys appropriately).

Advanced Analytics Enablement:
Work closely with Data Science and Analytics teams to enable AI and advanced analytics. Provide well-structured data sets and create pipelines that feed machine learning models (e.g., customer personalization models, predictive analytics). Implement mechanisms to handle real-time streaming data (using tools like Kinesis or Kafka if needed) and ensure data quality and freshness for AI use cases.

Efficiency and Scalability:
Design efficient, scalable processes for data handling. This includes optimizing ETL jobs (monitoring and tuning Glue/Spark jobs), implementing incremental data loading strategies instead of full loads where possible, and ensuring our data infrastructure can scale to growing data volumes. You will continually seek opportunities to automate manual data management tasks and improve pipeline reliability (CI/CD for data pipelines).

Data Governance & Security:
Embed data governance into the architecture – implement data cataloging, lineage tracking, and governance policies. Ensure compliance with data privacy and security standards: implement access controls, encryption (at-rest…