Enterprise Data Architect

Primary Role

The Enterprise Data Architect designs and implements scalable, secure, and reliable data architectures across on‑premises and cloud environments, ensuring alignment with organizational strategy. The role integrates complex data systems to support analytics, BI, and AI, while enforcing standards for modeling, governance, security, and compliance.
The architect partners with executives, business leaders, and technical teams to modernize legacy platforms, drive cloud and Lakehouse adoption, and promote data‑driven decision‑making.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead enterprise‑level data architecture strategies ensuring scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Define and evolve data lake, Lakehouse, warehouse patterns to support analytics and AI.
• Design and maintain conceptual, logical, physical data models with modeling standards.
• Oversee integration of complex on‑prem systems to support analytics, BI, AI workloads.
• Create shared standards to keep data usage consistent across domains.
• Define and enforce enterprise standards for modeling, data quality, governance, security, privacy, and compliance.
• Establish governance processes for ownership, lineage, metadata, access controls, retention, and regulatory compliance (e.g., PII).
• Coordinate with security to implement encryption, masking, RBAC/ABAC audits.
• Support responsible AI and enterprise data governance practices.
• Partner with data engineers to design batch and streaming pipelines (ETL/ELT).
• Define standards for ingestion, monitoring, observability, SLAs, data quality checks, alerting, and incident handling.
• Introduce data observability practices to ensure reliability in enterprise datasets.
• Lead large‑scale data migration and modernization initiatives, including cloud adoption and legacy decommissioning.
• Drive adoption of modern data platforms and emerging technologies (Lakehouse, streaming, cataloging, governance tools).
• Optimize data storage, retrieval, and lifecycle management for performance, resilience, and cost.
• Partner with platform/DevOps teams to support CI/CD for data workloads.
• Ensure AI‑ready data: curated, documented, high‑quality datasets and features for BI, data science, and AI search.
• Support semantic modeling and reusable data products for enterprise analytics.
• Provide technical leadership to engineers, analysts, and project teams on modeling and architecture patterns.
• Collaborate with executives and business stakeholders to align architecture with organizational strategies.
• Communicate complex technical concepts in clear, business‑focused language.
• Evaluate and recommend data platform technologies, tools, and patterns based on business needs.

Skills and Competencies

• Expert in data architecture and engineering across hybrid and cloud environments.
• Strong knowledge of data lakes, warehouses, Lakehouse designs, and streaming systems.
• Strong data modeling skills (relational, dimensional, analytics models).
• Strong SQL and advanced programming experience in Python or C#.
• Hands‑on experience with big data/distributed platforms and cloud warehouses (Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift).
• Experience with ETL/ELT, streaming ingestion, APIs, and messaging patterns.
• Strong knowledge of governance, privacy, security, compliance, and data quality.
• Familiarity with data catalogs, metadata management, and lineage tools.
• Proven ability to lead modernization and cloud migration projects.
• Ability to influence cross‑functional teams and manage stakeholders.
• Ability to present architectural options to technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Experience defining and measuring SLAs, SLOs, and data quality KPIs.
• Experience with CI/CD for data workloads and infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Experience with data observability platforms or practices.

Experience and Education

• 7+ years in data roles (e.g., DBA, Database Developer, Data Engineer, Data Architect) with at least 3 years in enterprise data architecture or platform design.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Science, Information Systems, or related degrees.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., Azure/AWS data or architecture certifications) are highly valued.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $125,000.00 - $140,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off

Application Question(s):

• Are you able to come into an office for in-person interviews?
• Are you able to come into the office in Rockville, MD 2 times per week?
• This position requires US Citizenship. Are you a US Citizen?

Work Location: In person