Lead Data Platform Architect

CLA is a top 10 national professional services firm where our purpose is to create opportunities every day, for our clients, our people, and our communities through industry-focused wealth advisory, digital, audit, tax, consulting, and outsourcing services. Even with more than 8,500 people, 130 U.S. locations, and a global reach, we promise to know you and help you.

CLA is dedicated to building a culture that invites different beliefs and perspectives to the table, so we can truly know and help our clients, communities, and each other.

CLA is growing and seeking to hire an experienced Senior Data Platform Architect to join our talented Information Technology team. The position offers growth, flexibility and a collaborative work environment.

This role is responsible for guiding platform architecture and engineering practices across one or more platform domains (e.g., cloud foundation, container platforms, integration, data platforms, developer experience). This role leads a small team of platform architects, sets technical direction, establishes enterprise platform standards, and partners with Cloud Architecture, Dev Ops, and engineering leaders to define platform strategies, automation frameworks, and CI/CD deployment patterns that enable secure, scalable, and reliable software delivery across the organization.

• Define and evolve platform reference architectures, standards, guardrails, and deployment patterns that enable engineering teams to deliver software safely, consistently, and efficiently.
• Establish target-state platform roadmaps aligned to business strategy, cloud strategy, security requirements, and technical debt reduction.
• Partner with Cloud Architecture leaders to align platform capabilities, cloud services, and infrastructure standards with enterprise architecture objectives.
• Evaluate technology options and make architecture recommendations balancing cost, risk, scalability, maintainability, and operational effectiveness.

• Lead architecture and design reviews for complex platform initiatives and provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams.
• Define enterprise CI/CD architecture standards, deployment patterns, automation frameworks, and software delivery guardrails.
• Partner with Dev Ops leaders to establish and continuously improve build, release, deployment, and environment management practices across the technology organization.
• Ensure platform solutions meet non-functional requirements including availability, performance, resilience, security, compliance, and operability.
• Drive adoption of platform capabilities through reference implementations, reusable patterns, technical guidance, and governance.

• Provide day-to-day leadership through coaching, mentoring, development, and performance management.
• Support hiring, onboarding, workforce planning, and technical skill development.

• Promote secure-by-design and compliance-by-default architectural patterns.
• Establish governance processes that ensure platform solutions adhere to architectural standards, operational requirements, and risk management practices.
• Own or co‑own platform reliability practices, including SLOs, SLIs, incident reviews, root‑cause analysis, and continuous reliability improvements.
• Define platform lifecycle management, including versioning, deprecation strategies, change management, and adoption planning.

• Translate complex technical topics into clear decisions and tradeoffs for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Partner with Cloud Architecture, Dev Ops, Security, Infrastructure, Network, Data, and Application teams to ensure end-to-end solution integrity and alignment.
• Create and maintain architecture artifacts including reference architectures, diagrams, ADRs, deployment standards, and decision logs.

6 years relevant experience required.

• Experience in platform engineering, cloud architecture, SRE, or infrastructure engineering preferred.
• Supervisory experience preferred.

Bache…