Senior Data Architect

We are seeking a Senior Data Architect to provide an independent third‑party perspective on an ongoing enterprise Data Modernization program. The role focuses on architecture assurance, risk mitigation, and acceleration of platform adoption, ensuring alignment with enterprise‑scale best practices and long‑term strategic goals.

The architect will work independently with client stakeholders and multiple vendor teams, validating decisions, challenging assumptions, and guiding the program toward a scalable, secure, and future‑ready lakehouse architecture on Databricks.

• Architecture Advisory Independent Review: Provide objective third‑party evaluation of the current data platform architecture design choices and implementation approach, review and validate lakehouse architecture including ingestion, transformation, storage and consumption layers, identify gaps, design risks and antipatterns across the platform, recommend alternative approaches and tradeoffs aligned to enterprise standards, assess alignment to modern data platform paradigms (Lakehouse, ELT, Medallion architecture), data ingestion patterns (batch, streaming, unstructured data integration), data modeling and transformation strategies, analytics and AI/ML readiness of the platform, ensure consistency with enterprise‑scale governance, security, and performance requirements, proactively identify technical architectural and operational risks impacting delivery timelines and scalability, conduct design reviews and provide mitigation strategies and decision frameworks, flag dependencies, constraints and potential long‑term impacts of current design choices, support leadership with architecture risk summaries and decision recommendations.
• Multi‑Vendor Stakeholder Engagement: Work independently with customer architects and SMEs, internal delivery teams, and third‑party vendors; facilitate architecture discussions, workshops and governance reviews; act as a neutral technical authority to resolve architectural conflicts and drive consensus.
• Best Practices Governance: Define and enforce architecture standards, design patterns and guardrails; ensure adoption of Databricks and Spark best practices, data governance frameworks (cataloging, access control and auditing), performance, cost optimization and scalability standards; provide guidance on Data Ops, Dev Ops practices and observability frameworks.
• Acceleration Program Support: Identify opportunities to accelerate delivery and remove bottlenecks, guide teams in prioritizing architectural decisions that unlock progress, support roadmap refinement for phased platform evolution.

• 14 years in data engineering, data architecture or analytics platform engineering.
• Proven experience in enterprise data modernization or cloud migration programs.
• Strong background in Databricks‑based lakehouse implementations at scale.
• Technical
  
  Skills:
  
  
  • Deep expertise in AWS cloud.
  • Delta Lake and lakehouse design patterns.
  • Data ingestion and ELT frameworks.
  • Data governance and cataloging approaches.
  • Performance optimization and distributed systems.
• Advisory Leadership
  
  Skills:
  
  
  • Operate independently as a trusted advisor in a complex multivendor environment.
  • Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills.
  • Capability to challenge existing designs constructively and drive consensus.
  • Strong analytical and problem‑solving mindset.

• Focus on independent assurance rather than delivery ownership.
• Consultative mindset combined with deep architectural expertise.
• Strong emphasis on decision validation, cross‑team alignment, and risk mitigation.
• Ability to influence outcomes without direct team ownership.

• Experience in insurance or regulated industries.
• Exposure to BI analytics transformation tools.
• Prior experience in architecture governance boards or external advisory roles.

This position includes a bonus or variable payout component based on individual and organizational performance. Actual compensation within the range will be dependent upon the individual's skills, experience, performance and internal equity.