Snowflake Architect

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Snowflake Architect to lead the design, evolution, and governance of our Snowflake data platform. This strategic role will focus on architecting scalable, secure, and high-performance solutions that support enterprise-wide data initiatives. You will collaborate with engineering teams, analysts, business stakeholders, and data governance leaders to define best practices, optimize platform usage, and ensure the data ecosystem is aligned with organizational goals.

Location: Remote

Status: Contract

Responsibilities:

• Snowflake Architecture & Platform Strategy
• Define the overall architecture of Snowflake environments, including account structure, multi-cluster warehouses, data zones, and data sharing strategies.
• Develop platform standards and governance policies for databases, schemas, roles, and compute resource allocation.
• Lead capacity planning, cost optimization, and usage monitoring initiatives across all Snowflake environments.
• Establish security models including role-based access control (RBAC), row-level security (RLS), and column-level security (CLS), ensuring alignment with governance and compliance requirements.
• Data Modeling & DBT Framework Design
• Guide the implementation of scalable DBT-based data transformation pipelines following modular, testable, and reusable patterns.
• Architect dimensional models (star and snowflake schemas) to support enterprise BI, semantic layers, and data products.
• Define standards for DBT project organization, testing coverage, naming conventions, and performance optimization.
• Performance Engineering & Optimization
• Provide architectural guidance for large-scale SQL query design, clustering strategies, and caching mechanisms.
• Partner with engineering teams to design compute-optimized solutions using workload-aware warehouse sizing and scheduling.
• Lead initiatives to monitor and optimize platform performance, query execution plans, and storage utilization.
• Governance, Quality, & Compliance
• Collaborate with data governance teams to align architecture with metadata management, lineage tracking, and data quality frameworks.
• Design solutions that incorporate automated testing, validation, and anomaly detection using tools like DBT, Great Expectations, or custom frameworks.
• Ensure adherence to organizational standards for documentation, data stewardship, and access controls.
• Analytics Enablement & BI Integration
• Define best practices for exposing curated data models and semantic layers to BI platforms (e.g., Power BI).
• Support scalable data access strategies through optimized views, data marts, and materialized outputs.
• Provide architectural support for Power BI models, including DirectQuery, Import, and hybrid configurations.
• Cross-functional Collaboration & Documentation
• Serve as a technical advisor to data engineers, analysts, and business units on best practices and architectural decisions.
• Document data architecture, lineage, security design, and platform configurations for transparency and supportability.
• Lead design reviews, POCs, and architectural assessments for new data initiatives.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience architecting solutions on the Snowflake Data Cloud.
• Deep understanding of Snowflake account structure, compute management, cost optimization, and security.
• Expertise in dimensional modeling, DBT architecture, and ELT best practices.
• Strong command of SQL performance tuning, warehouse scaling, and data transformation strategies.
• Experience working with BI tools (especially Power BI) and their integration with Snowflake.
• Familiarity with modern data governance, metadata management, and data quality frameworks.
• Proven ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams and communicate technical concepts clearly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Snowflake Cortex, Snowpipe, and native integrations with third-party tools.
• Working knowledge of DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and version control in DBT environments.
• Familiarity with enterprise data catalogs, data lineage tools, and policy-driven governance platforms.

Prior experience in designing hybrid cloud or multi-region Snowflake architectures.