Snowflake Data Architect

About the Role

BlueCloud is seeking an experienced Data Architect to lead the assessment, design, and modernization of enterprise data platforms, with a strong focus on Snowflake. This role combines architecture leadership, hands-on platform expertise, and direct client engagement.

You will define target-state architectures, assess existing data estates, establish modernization roadmaps, and guide multidisciplinary delivery teams through implementation. You will also help clients create secure, governed, cost-efficient, and AI-ready data platforms that support both current analytics requirements and future AI and context-layer initiatives.

The ideal candidate is a trusted technical advisor who can translate complex business requirements into practical architecture solutions and communicate effectively with engineering teams, business stakeholders, and executive sponsors.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, assessment, and modernization of enterprise Snowflake data platforms.

• Define current-state and target-state architectures across data ingestion, transformation, storage, orchestration, governance, security, and consumption.

• Lead inventories and assessments of Python-, SQL-, and stored-procedure-based pipelines, classifying workloads by business criticality, frequency, volume, runtime, reliability, and cost.

• Analyze Snowflake usage telemetry to establish cost and performance baselines across pipelines, warehouses, and workloads.

• Identify architectural and engineering anti-patterns, including procedural row-by-row processing, unnecessary full refreshes, missing incremental patterns, redundant transformations, warehouse mis-sizing, and insufficient workload isolation.

• Recommend modernization strategies using set-based processing, incremental data patterns, Dynamic Tables, Streams and Tasks, Snowpark, dbt, and appropriate orchestration technologies.

• Design scalable data models, governed data domains, semantic layers, and context models that support analytics and AI use cases.

• Architect Snowflake Cortex solutions using capabilities such as Cortex Analyst, Cortex Search, and Cortex LLM functions.

• Establish architectural standards for security, access control, data governance, lineage, observability, performance, resilience, and business continuity.

• Design data lakehouse and real-time data-processing architectures across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

• Evaluate and recommend appropriate use of Snowflake Iceberg Tables and other open data architecture patterns.

• Build prioritized optimization backlogs and sequenced delivery roadmaps based on business impact, technical risk, cost, performance, and implementation effort.

• Provide technical leadership across multiple concurrent projects and guide engineers, analysts, QA specialists, and DevOps teams.

• Support project planning, estimation, scope definition, dependency management, risk mitigation, and technical governance.

• Lead discovery workshops and interviews with client stakeholders and subject-matter experts.

• Present architecture decisions, assessment findings, quantified impact projections, and roadmap recommendations to technical and executive audiences.

• Act as a trusted advisor to clients throughout architecture and delivery engagements.

• Create and maintain architecture diagrams, decision records, technical standards, and platform documentation.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or a comparable senior technical role.

• At least 2–4 years of deep Snowflake architecture and implementation experience.

• Proven experience designing and modernizing enterprise-scale Snowflake data platforms.

• Strong knowledge of Snowflake environment design, security, governance, data modeling, workload management, and performance and cost optimization.

• Hands-on experience with Snowflake capabilities including Snowpark, Dynamic Tables, Streams and Tasks, stored procedures, and system usage views.

• Expert-level SQL and strong Python skills.

• Strong experience with dbt and data pipeline or orchestration technologies such as Fivetran, Kafka, Airflow, or similar tools.

• Experience designing batch, streaming, lakehouse, and cloud-native data architectures.

• Strong understanding of data governance, access control, lineage, data quality, and metadata management.

• Experience with at least one major cloud platform: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

• Proven ability to lead discovery, assessment, architecture, and modernization engagements.

• Experience providing technical leadership across multidisciplinary Agile delivery teams.

• Strong client-facing, presentation, and stakeholder-management skills.

• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineering teams, business leaders, and executive sponsors.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Snowflake Cortex, including Cortex Analyst, Cortex Search, or Cortex LLM functions.

• Experience building governed semantic or context layers for AI and LLM-based applications.

• Experience with Snowflake Iceberg Tables and open lakehouse architectures.

• Familiarity with Terraform, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code practices.

• Experience with FinOps, cloud cost governance, and Snowflake consumption optimization.

• Experience designing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.

• SnowPro Advanced: Architect or SnowPro Core certification.

• Consulting or enterprise client-delivery experience.

• Experience acting as a technical delivery lead or Scrum Master when required.

• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, and architecture tools such as Lucidchart.