IT Architect – Data & Snowflake (Senior Software Systems Engineer)

Job Title: IT Architect – Data & Snowflake (Senior Software Systems Engineer)

Rate: $70/hour W2
Location: 600 Canal Street, Richmond, VA 23219, USA
Work Arrangement: Hybrid (Week in Office / Week Remote)

 

Overview

The IT Architect – Data & Snowflake is a strategic technical leader within the Enterprise Data & Analytics team, responsible for defining the architecture, standards, best practices and future direction of the enterprise data platform. This role designs scalable data pipelines, governs Snowflake usage across the organization, and develops high quality data models that power analytics, BI, AI/ML, and data driven decision making.

The architect ensures that the data ecosystem is secure, governed, cost optimized, and capable of supporting enterprise self service analytics, operational reporting, and advanced analytics initiatives.

We are seeking a hands on Data Architect with a strong ETL and Data Engineering background to design, build, and optimize large scale data ingestion, transformation, and delivery platforms. This role is focused on creating reliable, observable, and high performance data pipelines that support enterprise analytics, reporting, and advanced AI/ML use cases.

You will architect end to end data engineering solutions across on prem and cloud platforms, lead data integration strategy, and establish best practices around data quality, monitoring, and operational excellence.
 

Technical Leadership

• Serve as technical authority for ETL and data engineering architecture
• Review pipeline designs, code standards, and performance benchmarks
• Mentor data engineers on best practices and modern data engineering patterns
• Partner with stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Lead complex enterprise data engineering initiatives

ETL / ELT Architecture & Design

• Design and own end-to-end ETL/ELT architectures
• Create batch and incremental processing frameworks
• Define patterns for data ingestion from Oracle Exadata and other source systems
• Architect high-volume, high-throughput pipelines
• Establish standards for:
  • Data transformation logic
  • Schema evolution
  • Error handling and reprocessing
  • Performance tuning
• Define best practices for:
  • Metadata management
  • Parameterization and reusability
  • Pipeline deployment and versioning

Enterprise Data Architecture

• Architect batch, streaming, and real-time data pipelines
• Define architectural standards for:
  • Database design
  • Data warehouse sizing
  • Multi-cluster strategies
  • RBAC
  • Performance optimization
• Create enterprise semantic models and curated datasets
• Develop architecture patterns supporting AI/ML feature pipelines and model scoring within Snowflake

Governance & Best Practices

• Establish enterprise standards for data engineering and modeling
• Implement DevOps/DataOps practices
• Automated testing
• CI/CD pipelines
• Data quality controls
• Observability standards
• Partner with Data Governance teams on lineage, metadata and cataloging
• Implement Snowflake security, auditing and cost management standards

Analytics & Data Product Enablement

• Design governed data models supporting BI, dashboards and KPIs
• Support predictive analytics, forecasting and segmentation use cases
• Guide development of enterprise data products

Operational Excellence

• Establish standards for monitoring, alerting and SLA/SLO management
• Ensure scalability, resiliency and disaster recovery requirements are met
• Lead root cause analysis and remediation efforts
• Drive data quality and observability initiatives

Soft Skills

• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to collaborate across multidisciplinary teams
• Effective leadership and stakeholder management skills

Nice to Have

• Snowflake Certification
• Azure Certification
• Databricks Certification
• Informatica Certification

Education

• High School Diploma or Equivalent Required

Interview Process

• Microsoft Teams Interview
• Camera On Required

Candidate Location Requirements

• Local Richmond-area candidates strongly preferred
• Drive-in candidates acceptable
• Must be willing to work hybrid schedule (week onsite / week remote)