(Only W2) Lead Cloudera Consultant (Solution Architect) - 100% Remote within US

Job Title: Lead Cloudera Consultant (Solution Architect)

Type: 6-month contract to start

Location: 100% Remote within US (Prefer Houston to go onsite occasionally or west coast if remote)

Job Summary:

We are seeking an experienced Lead Cloudera Consultant to provide architecture guidance, advisory services, and hands-on support for building secure, scalable, and decoupled data pipelines across non-production and production environments. This role includes training client teams on Cloudera platform best practices and ensuring successful delivery of data movement and curation solutions aligned with business KPIs.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Design: Design and implement secure, scalable, and decoupled data pipelines across on-premises and cloud Cloudera platforms.
• Provide architectural guidance for integrating message brokers (e.g., Kafka) and warehousing solutions (e.g., Snowflake Iceberg).
• Development Support: Assist client teams with backlog execution and development of data products
• Ensure end-to-end updates without negative impact on other data products.
• Training & Knowledge Transfer: Develop and deliver tailored training sessions and materials for technical leads, data engineers, and architects.
• Enable client teams to build, extend, and support pipelines independently.
• Performance & Optimization: Implement cost-performance trade-offs to meet KPIs (e.g., data flow within 5 minutes at target resource cost).
• Advise on cost optimization strategies during initial engagement phase.
• Integration & Automation: Configure CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Implement automated testing and logging (Datadog) for performance and error tracking.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure secrets are managed securely using approved tools.
• Document and transition all data flows, logic, and components to sustaining teams.

Required Qualifications:

• Proven experience as a Cloudera Solution Architect or Lead Consultant in enterprise environments.
• Expertise in Cloudera CDP, Hadoop ecosystem, Kafka, Flink, and SSB.
• Strong knowledge of data curation, metadata management, and schema design.
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake Iceberg or similar warehousing technologies.
• Proficiency in CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions) and logging tools (Datadog).
• Familiarity with cloud and on-premises Cloudera deployments.
• Excellent communication and training skills.

Required Skills:

1. Cloudera Platform Expertise:

• Deep experience with Cloudera CDP (on-prem and cloud)
• Strong understanding of Cloudera as an operational data store for transient/transactional data Familiarity with Cloudera tooling: Kafka, Flink, SSB

1. Data Architecture & Integration:

• Proven ability to design secure, scalable, decoupled data pipelines
• Experience integrating message brokers (Kafka, Azure Service Bus)
• Knowledge of CDC (Change Data Capture) patterns using Kafka
• Experience with data ingestion from flat files, relational, document, and graph databases

1. Data Warehousing & Catalogs

• Hands-on experience with Snowflake Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Databricks
• Understanding of Apache Polaris or similar cataloging solutions
• Ability to manage writebacks from multiple sources into Iceberg

1. Automation & DevOps

• Experience configuring CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions
• Familiarity with automated testing, logging, and deployment tracking
• Proficiency with Datadog for observability and performance monitoring

1. Security & Compliance

• Implementation of modern authentication protocols
• Knowledge of end-to-end encryption and secure secrets management

1. Leadership & Enablement

• Ability to advise across distributed teams (Houston, Curitiba, Kuala Lumpur)
• Strong training and knowledge-sharing capabilities
• Experience working in consultative roles with enterprise clients
• Comfortable challenging conventional approaches and guiding best practices

1. Communication & Collaboration

• Excellent communication skills to work with technical leads
• Ability to document and transition architecture and flows to sustaining teams
• Time zone alignment with Houston/west coast preferred

Preferred Skills:

• Cloudera Certified Professional or equivalent certifications.
• Experience with secret management tools and enterprise security practices.
• Knowledge of cost optimization strategies for large-scale data platforms.