Principal Solutions Architect - Data

Company Alaska Airlines The Team

Guided by our purpose, core values, and leadership principles, we are creating an airline people love. Our corporate teams set the strategies and operational plans to ensure the success of our company. Whether we use our expertise in accounting, human resources, finance, planning, legal, marketing, or any of our operational divisions, our shared passion for travel and our guests is what motivates us to achieve excellence each day.

If you share our passion for creating an airline people love, we want to hear from you.

The Principal Solutions Architect is a sole subject matter expert in data architecture, engineering best practices, and the Data Services technology stack. As an individual contributor, this role defines long-term strategy for the ITS Data Services Team to develop and maintain the Enterprise Data Platform. This highly autonomous, strategic role will exercise considerable latitude and initiative to shape data solution strategies, resolve technical and governance challenges, and drive innovation across the data ecosystem.

• Act as lead subject matter expert on data architecture, tool stack, best practices, and engineering offerings of the Data Services Team.
• Act as liaison to both internal IT teams and external Business teams on the best data architecture and solutions for ingestion patterns, consumption optimization, data security, access framework, governance, modernization, and innovation.
• Define the long‑term strategy, facilitate implementation, and document technologies, products, and/or systems involved in data solutions; sometimes while negotiating short‑term solutions to remove blockers.
• Collaborate closely with business and technical stakeholders to design scalable, secure, and maintainable data solutions that align with enterprise standards and strategic objectives.
• Communicate and reinforce technical guidance, in partnership with Principal/Senior engineers, to maintain current technology standards and guidelines; prescribe modifications where needed; and ensure new efforts fit within the overall strategies.
• Explore, evaluate, recommend, and act as the lead subject matter in emerging technology trends and proof‑of‑concept efforts.
• Steers technical architecture assessments of potential technologies.
• Develop and influence decisions across the company and several levels up for improvements to technology architectures, including cost analyses.
• Participate in Analytics stakeholder workshops to help build Data products per IT SDLC standards.
• Manage solution designs, technical specifications, methodologies, processes, and IT technical guidelines.
• Drive resolution and coordination with internal Data Services team on complex projects across all domains.

Required

• 7 years of experience in data engineering, big data platforms, and analytics, including independent work on large‑scale data architectures or related area.
• Bachelor’s degree, or an additional two years of relevant training/experience in lieu of this degree.
• Demonstrated experience architecting, implementing, and creating complex technology solutions.
• Proven experience in quickly learning new technologies and methodologies.
• Demonstrated ability in effectively communicating technical concepts to a wide variety of audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to identify, analyze, and solve complex business and technical challenges.
• Strong background in Data Warehousing, relational databases, noSQL databases, the nuances of batch vs real‑time data, Databricks, Apache Spark and distributed computing, Oracle, SQL Server, understand the fundamentals of Inmon vs Kimball methodology, ODS, analytics vs transactional data systems, data security, and data access frameworks.
• Demonstrated understanding of standard data ingestion, consumption patterns, and all that Productionization of a data product entail.
• Experience with business requirements gathering/analysis techniques.
• Highly organized with a demonstrated systematic approach to carrying out assignments.
• Experience producing proofs of concept with different technologies to accurately arrive at working solution to a…