Data Architect

Title: Data Architect
Location: New York, NY (Hybrid 3 Days Onsite)
Rate: DOE
Employment Type: Contract
Key Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end architecture and solution design for Snowflake-based enterprise data platforms.
• Design logical and physical data models, ingestion frameworks, and scalable storage architectures, including raw, curated, and semantic layers.
• Architect high-performance data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouse solutions with a focus on scalability, optimization, and cost efficiency.
• Implement AI-powered solutions using Snowflake Cortex capabilities, including Cortex LLM functions, Cortex Search, Cortex Analyst, vector embeddings, semantic search, RAG architectures, and AI agents.
• Design and optimize real-time and batch data pipelines using Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks, and Snowpark (Python/Scala/Java).
• Define and enforce enterprise data governance, security, and compliance frameworks, including RBAC, masking policies, encryption, lineage, and secure data sharing.
• Integrate data from cloud, on-premises, and SaaS platforms using modern orchestration and ETL/ELT tools.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, data engineers, analysts, and data scientists to deliver scalable and reusable data products.
• Lead migration initiatives from legacy platforms and establish enterprise reference architectures and standards.
• Monitor platform health and optimize Snowflake environments for performance, workload management, high availability, replication, and disaster recovery.
• Mentor junior engineers and architects while promoting best practices in data modeling methodologies such as Data Vault, Kimball, and hybrid approaches.
• Support AI/ML initiatives by enabling AI-ready data foundations and integrating structured and unstructured data sources.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Data Architecture, Data Engineering, or Data Platform roles.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience designing and optimizing Snowflake solutions.
• Strong expertise with Snowflake features, including:
  • Snowpark
  • Snowpipe
  • Streams & Tasks
  • Warehouses & Resource Monitors
  • Zero-Copy Cloning
  • Time Travel
  • Data Sharing
  • Security & Governance Controls
• Strong proficiency in SQL and advanced data modeling techniques (conceptual, logical, and physical).
• Experience designing scalable ETL/ELT pipelines and cloud-native data architectures.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud platforms.
• Strong understanding of performance tuning, query optimization, and cost management strategies.
• Experience implementing secure architectures for analytics, reporting, and AI/ML workloads.
• Knowledge of data governance, lineage, data quality, and compliance standards such as GDPR, SOC2, or HIPAA.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and leadership skills.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field