Senior Data Architect

Location: Canada, Remote

Seniority: Senior

Estimated Duration: 12 months with possible extension for another 6 months

Work authorization: any (candidate must be authorized to work in CA)

Senior Data Architect

We are seeking a senior Data Architect to lead the data strategy for a high-impact legacy system replacement within the Alberta Public Sector. This critical role ensures that the transition from a legacy trust administration system to a modern Microsoft Dynamics (CRM & Finance) ecosystem meets all strategic, security, and technical objectives.

• Lead solution architecture and design on cloud and key data platforms. Ensure alignment with business requirements
• Lead design and governance of schemas, tables, relationships, security roles and data access patterns
• Promote data models and practices to reduce redundancy
• Guide platform/infrastructure teams to configure data platform services to meet solution requirements.
• Participate in planning on implementation strategy, technology stack, design patterns and process
• Advise on configuration vs customization to support long term sustainability
• Review/approve vendor delivered data designs, strategies and implementations
• Advise and coach teams throughout project. Provide knowledge transfer
• Define end to end data architecture, including all integrated applications and systems; develop conceptual, logical and data models aligned with platform standards, enterprise data policies, including Dataverse data modeling
• Ensure architectural alignment across system modules, integrated applications, Power Platform components, Azure and downstream reporting environments
• Establish data architecture principles and standards consistent with GoA architecture frameworks
• Architect integrations between solution and external systems, including legacy platforms, document repositories, etc
• Ensure data exchanges meet security, privacy and auditability standards
• Work with Microsoft Dynamics to design how data is organized, stored, integrated and managed across Dynamics 365 ecosystem and broader Microsoft cloud environment (Power Platform, Azure, Fabric)
• Work with Microsoft Dynamics’ Finance & Operations for managing financial data
• Data Migration
• Serve as GoA lead in data mapping from legacy platform to the new application, ensuring accurate lineage, transformations and alignment with new data models
• Collaborate with vendor to validate mapping logic, support build activities, and ensure mappings are technically feasible
• Work with business areas to define/confirm data rules, resolve data gaps, and ensure mappings support functional, operational, and reporting needs
• Lead data migration strategy. Define extraction, transformation, cleansing, and validation approaches aligned with business rules. Ensure data integrity, traceability, and reconciliation throughout migration activities
• Support parallel-run and cutover strategies to minimize business disruption
• Data Lakehouse – Architecture & Design
• Define data warehouse/lakehouse approach and architecture and related requirements
• Define storage, archival and retrieval approach for legacy data and target data structures and storage solutions for new system data to ensure performance and long term maintainability
• Use Microsoft tools to create a modern data warehouse/lakehouse (e.g. Azure Services - Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Databricks for big data processing, analytics, data warehousing)
• Design data mesh/lakehouse architectures using Microsoft Azure technology stack to unify data management and analytics.
• Data Quality & Readiness
• Define data quality standards, validation rules and acceptance criteria for migrated and operational data
• Support business validation activities, including sampling, reconciliation and exception management
• Ensure data readiness across project stages (e.g. user acceptance testing, training, go-live)
• Identify and mitigate data-related risks early
• Data Governance & Compliance
• Ensure compliance with GoA policies - privacy, records management, data retention, access control, etc
• Define and enforce data classification, retention schedules, and information lifecycle management within platform and integrated platforms
• Collaborate with security, privacy, records management teams to implement data governance practices/controls. Support audits, compliance reviews, architectural assurance processes
• Reporting
• Ensure new solution and data architecture enable effective reporting/analytics, including in solution dashboards and Power BI reports
• Define data flows into reporting platforms and downstream analytics environments
• Ensure consistency between operational and analytical data models
• Ensure architecture security, enforcing data/reports are only accessible to certain individuals/groups
• Implement anonymization, restricting access to sensitive data from certain individuals/groups
• Delivery Oversight
• Oversight across Agile delivery cycles, ensuring data considerations are embedded early in design and backlog…