Principal Data Architect (Cloud)

Collinwood is assisting our client in their effort to hire/engage an experienced Principal Cloud Data Architect. In this role, you will be the senior data voice on client engagements. You map how a company’s data is stored, moved, and owned today, design where it should go, and give its leaders decisions they can act on. You work directly with chief information officers, data platform leads and engineers, and you produce the work yourself. The role spans strategy, discovery, and build engagements across clients and industries. It also shapes how our client practices data architecture: the methods, the tooling and the people.

What you will do:

• Assess a client’s current data estate: inventory its databases and data stores, with contents, technology, owner, and whether each is an original or a copy.
• Diagram how data moves today, including integration jobs, replication, file transfers, and manual steps.
• Define the client’s core business records and identify which system is the authoritative source for each.
• Design target data platforms: lakes and warehouses, ingestion, modeling, governance, and the data foundation for analytics and AI.
• Define how data ownership works at the client, and recommend data standards, common definitions and terms for data exchanged between systems and third parties.
• Estimate what a cloud data platform will cost as data volumes grow.
• Build roadmaps that sequence data work by business value.
• Present to executives, architecture review boards and engineering teams, and revise your work from their feedback.
• Guide data engineers through the build when an engagement moves into delivery.

• Join discovery calls with prospective clients.
• Define the data scope of proposals and estimate the effort.

• Set the standard for data architecture deliverables.
• Use and improve our AI tooling for profiling catalogs, jobs, and schemas.
• Mentor data engineers and architects.

What we need from you:

• Ten or more years in data architecture or data engineering, including several as the lead architect on enterprise programs.
• Experience designing and delivering cloud data platforms on Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, including layered lake designs with raw, cleaned, and curated data.
• Hands-on depth in at least one established enterprise data stack, such as Microsoft SQL Server with its integration and reporting services.
• Experience moving an organization from many inconsistent databases to governed data: master data management, golden records, common data models, and data ownership.
• Working knowledge of data integration patterns: batch, change data capture, application programming interfaces, events and file transfer.
• Consulting experience. You have run client workshops, presented to executives, and written deliverables a client accepted.
• The ability to work at two levels: as an executive and as a "hands-on" data engineer/architect.
• Regular use of AI tools such as Claude or Cursor in your own work.
• Clear written English. Your deliverables are documents and diagrams.

• Experience in regulated industries such as insurance, financial services, or healthcare.
• Experience preparing data for AI use cases, including semantic layers and retrieval.
• Experience with enterprise resource planning and finance systems as data sources.
• Experience with legacy platforms such as mainframe and midrange systems.
• Experience at companies undergoing an acquisition or experiencing rapid growth.