Lead Data Architect

Job Description
Lead Data Architect (Google spanner)

Own the target-state data architecture on Google Spanner, ensuring the new data model satisfies functional correctness, performance SLOs, and transactional semantics required by 1000+ applications before large-scale app rewrites occur.
This role is not a schema converter. It is a distributed systems architect role.

Key Responsibilities
Data Architecture & Modeling

• Define the Logical Canonical Data Model (LCDM) independent of physical storage.
• Design Spanner-native physical schemas:
  • Primary key strategy
  • Row key distribution (hotspot avoidance)
  • Interleaving decisions
  • Secondary index strategy
• Decide where denormalization, projections, or materialized views are required.

Transaction & Consistency Design

• Define transaction boundaries under Spanner constraints:
  • Single-partition vs multi-partition transactions
  • Atomicity and consistency trade-offs
• Classify workloads by strong consistency vs bounded staleness tolerance.
• Define idempotency and retry-safe patterns.

Compatibility & Contract Validation

• Work with QA and platform teams to validate:
  • CRUD contracts
  • Query semantics
  • Transaction invariants
• Review and sign off on schema compatibility scorecards.

Performance & Scalability

• Participate in workload replay analysis.
• Diagnose and resolve:
  • Hot key risks
  • Transaction conflicts
  • Index amplification
• Size Spanner instances and estimate cost envelopes.

Leadership

• Act as final authority for Spanner data design decisions.
• Mentor domain architects and engineers.
• Provide executive-level architectural rationale.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years in large-scale data architecture
• Deep expertise in Google Spanner internals:
  • TrueTime
  • Distributed transactions
  • Synchronous replication
• Experience designing petabyte-scale, multi-region OLTP systems
• Strong understanding of:
  • Distributed consistency models
  • Failure modes in globally distributed databases
• Prior Oracle distributed DB migration experience strongly preferred