Lead Data Architect

Location: Cupertino, CA
Salary: $125,000.00 USD Annually - $130,000.00 USD Annually
Description:
Job Title: Lead Data Architect

Location San Jose, CA or Scottsdale, AZ

Employment: Fulltime

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:

o Primary key strategy

o Row key distribution (hotspot avoidance)

o Interleaving decisions

o Secondary index strategy

Decide where denormalization, projections, or materialized views are required.

Transaction & Consistency Design

Define transaction boundaries under Spanner constraints:

o Single-partition vs multi-partition transactions

o 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:

o CRUD contracts

o Query semantics

o Transaction invariants

Review and sign off on schema compatibility scorecards.

Performance & Scalability

Participate in workload replay analysis.

Diagnose and resolve:

o Hot key risks

o Transaction conflicts

o 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:

o TrueTime

o Distributed transactions

o Synchronous replication

Experience designing petabyte-scale, multi-region OLTP systems

Strong understanding of:

o Distributed consistency models

o Failure modes in globally distributed databases

Prior Oracle ? distributed DB migration experience strongly preferred

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