Lead Data Architect Google Spanner

Position: Lead Data Architect   Google Spanner
Job Title:

Lead Data Architect – Google Spanner

Location:

• San Jose
• Scottsdale
• Remote

Duration: 6+ Months
Pay Rate: $54 – $56.81/hr

Employment Type:

W2 only Role Summary
Own the target-state data architecture on Google Spanner, ensuring the new data model satisfies functional correctness, performance SLOs, and transactional semantics required by 1000+ applications—before large-scale app rewrites occur.
This role is not a schema converter. It is a distributed systems architect role.

Key Responsibilities
Data Architecture & Modeling

• Define the Logical Canonical Data Model (LCDM) independent of physical storage
• Design Spanner-native physical schemas:
  • Primary key strategy
  • Row key distribution (hotspot avoidance)
  • Interleaving decisions
  • Secondary index strategy
• Decide where denormalization, projections, or materialized views are required

Transaction & Consistency Design

• Define transaction boundaries under Spanner constraints:
  • Single-partition vs multi-partition transactions
  • Atomicity and consistency trade-offs
• Classify workloads by strong consistency vs bounded staleness tolerance
• Define idempotency and retry-safe patterns

Compatibility & Contract Validation

• Work with QA and platform teams to validate:
  • CRUD contracts
  • Query semantics
  • Transaction in variants
• Review and sign off on schema compatibility scorecards

Performance & Scalability

• Participate in workload replay analysis
• Diagnose and resolve:
  • Hot key risks
  • Transaction conflicts
  • Index amplification
• Size Spanner instances and estimate cost envelopes

Leadership

• Act as final authority for Spanner data design decisions
• Mentor domain architects and engineers
• Provide executive-level architectural rationale

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of experience in large-scale data architecture
• Deep expertise in Google Spanner internals:
  • True Time
  • Distributed transactions
  • Synchronous replication
• Experience designing petabyte-scale, multi-region OLTP systems
• Strong understanding of:
  • Distributed consistency models
  • Failure modes in globally distributed databases
• Prior Oracle → distributed DB migration experience preferred

Key Deliverables

• Canonical logical data model
• Spanner physical schemas & index strategies
• Transaction design guidelines
• Performance readiness assessments
• Migration readiness sign-off per domain

Role Context / Related Functions

• Software Engineer (Cloud Spanner Platform)
• Site Reliability Engineer (SRE – Spanner)
• Engineering Manager (Spanner Migration)

Common Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• Experience with distributed computing, large-scale systems design, networking, and data storage
• Expertise in relational databases (SQL) and cloud infrastructure
• Strong leadership, collaboration, and troubleshooting skills

Core Focus Areas

• High reliability (99.999% availability, cross-region replication)
• Performance optimization (query execution, TB-scale data handling)
• Distributed systems with strong global consistency

Company Benefits & Culture

• Competitive salary and benefits package
• Opportunities for professional growth and advancement
• Dynamic and collaborative work environment

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