Job Location: Houston, TX (As and when required basis)
Job Title: Cloud & Data Senior Architect
Duration: Fulltime
Target Start Date: ASAP
Client is seeking a highly experienced Senior Architect, Data & Cloud Platforms to provide hands-on architecture leadership for the cloud and data-platform environment that supports the company's evolving enterprise data ecosystem. This role will guide the immediate maturation of Microsoft Fabric and Azure-based data capabilities while defining reliable, scalable, secure, and supportable cloud, database, integration, operational-data, and platform architecture patterns.
The Senior Architect will work across Data & Analytics, Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Applications, Commercial Systems, OT, and business teams. The role requires strong depth in cloud architecture and enterprise databases so that ingestion, replication, analytical access, and platform operations are designed without adversely affecting mission-critical source-system performance. The architect will also shape data patterns for commercial and trading environments where concurrency, latency, risk, auditability, market data, and position-management requirements influence the architecture.
JOB FUNCTIONS AND KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Define and maintain reference architectures, standards, patterns, decision records, and roadmaps for enterprise data and cloud platforms across Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and related technologies.
- Define and govern cloud landing-zone and environment architecture for the data ecosystem, including subscription structure, network topology, private connectivity, identity integration, environment segmentation, policy enforcement, monitoring, and secure platform scalability.
- Provide architecture leadership for Client's medallion architecture, including data acquisition, Bronze/Silver/Gold design, semantic and serving layers, data products, and platform interoperability.
- Define operational architecture for Microsoft Fabric and Azure-based data services, including workspace and capacity structure, tenant and environment controls, networking implications, monitoring patterns, workload placement, and production support requirements.
- Design source-aware ingestion patterns for batch, ETL/ELT, change data capture, replication, APIs, event streaming, and near-real-time processing.
- Assess source-system architecture, workload profile, transaction volume, concurrency, query plans, indexing, locking, log usage, network throughput, recovery objectives, and growth before approving ingestion designs.
- Define and apply patterns such as read replicas, availability-group secondaries, log-based CDC, incremental extraction, workload isolation, throttling, scheduling, and resource governance to protect operational source systems from analytical impact.
- Establish architecture standards for platform capacity, workload isolation, performance testing, throughput modeling, concurrency management, and scale-out patterns across Fabric, Azure data services, databases, and integration workloads.
- Define reliability architecture patterns for data and cloud platforms, including resiliency, failover, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, service continuity, capacity thresholds, observability, and production-readiness standards.
- Define architecture patterns for development, test, staging, and production environments, including deployment pathways, release controls, configuration management, rollback patterns, and production-change readiness.
- Incorporate cost, consumption, and scalability considerations into architecture decisions, including workload placement, capacity sizing, storage tiering, compute patterns, and vendor/platform tradeoffs.
- Partner with database, infrastructure, application, and source-system owners to resolve performance, availability, replication, security, and recovery implications of data movement and analytics access.
- Shape data architectures for commercial and trading capabilities, including ETRM integration, market and reference data, near-real-time positions, P&L, exposure, risk, settlement, valuation, audit lineage, and high-concurrency analytical workloads.
- Define architecture for operational and industrial data, including historians, PI, SCADA, time-series telemetry, event data, Maximo, and the integration of OT and enterprise data.
- Architect secure cloud connectivity and platform controls, including private endpoints, virtual networks, identity, SSO, SCIM, RBAC/ABAC, secrets, encryption, audit logging, and zero-trust patterns.
- Guide the implementation of data catalogs, metadata, lineage, master data, data quality, classification, privacy, fine-grained access, and governance technologies where they are required to support reliable platform operations and governed data consumption.
- Evaluate cloud services, databases, replication technologies, integration platforms, and vendor products using architecture, performance, security, resilience, operability, interoperability, and total-cost criteria.
- Lead architecture reviews and technical design sessions; document exceptions, dependencies, risks, and decisions in a practical and timely manner.
- Create proofs of concept and production pilots for emerging platform, cloud, database, integration, and reliability capabilities while defining measurable success criteria and production-readiness requirements.
- Mentor data engineers, platform engineers, database professionals, and solution architects; improve technical depth through reusable patterns, playbooks, and coaching.
- Partner with platform leadership to establish capacity models, observability, RTO/RPO, disaster recovery, release practices, and sustainable production operations.
- Other duties as assigned.
MINIMUM ESSENTIAL QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Management Information Systems, or a related technical field; equivalent relevant experience will be considered.
- 15+ years of progressive enterprise technology experience, including 10+ years in data, database, cloud, integration, or platform architecture roles.
- 7+ years of hands-on experience designing, administering, tuning, or architecting large enterprise relational database platforms such as SQL Server, Azure SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or comparable technologies.
- Demonstrated experience designing ingestion and replication patterns that protect source-system performance, availability, recoverability, and transaction processing.
- Deep experience with Microsoft Azure architecture, including storage, compute, networking, private connectivity, identity, security, monitoring, integration, and data services.
- Experience architecting modern cloud data platforms and lakehouse/warehouse environments using Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, Azure Synapse, or comparable technologies.
- Experience designing reliable and scalable cloud landing zones, network topologies, environment segmentation, policy controls, and production-ready platform architectures.
- Experience with ETL/ELT, log-based CDC, data replication, APIs, event streaming, orchestration, and near-real-time data movement.
- Strong knowledge of database performance engineering, query optimization, indexing, concurrency, HA/DR, backup and recovery, RTO/RPO, data tiering, and security.
- Experience defining capacity, resiliency, observability, workload isolation, release, and environment-promotion patterns for enterprise data and cloud platforms.
- Experience architecting secure multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments using private endpoints, network segmentation, identity and access management, encryption, logging, and audit controls.
- Experience defining enterprise data architecture standards across data management, security, governance, metadata, lineage, quality, and master data.
- Experience leading architecture reviews and influencing delivery teams, infrastructure, security, application owners, vendors, and executive stakeholders without relying solely on direct authority.
- Strong written and verbal communication, documentation, facilitation, and technical problem-solving skills.
- Regular and reliable attendance.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience in midstream, oil and gas, chemicals, manufacturing, utilities, banking, or another transaction-intensive or asset-intensive environment.
- Experience architecting data platforms for commodity trading, ETRM, supply and trading, risk, market data, position management, P&L, settlement, or commercial optimization.
- Experience with Maximo, Oracle, SQL Server, RightAngle or comparable ETRM platforms, and large enterprise source systems.
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric, ADLS Gen2, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Explorer, Event Hubs, Logic Apps, Functions, Azure DevOps, Entra ID, and Power BI.
- Experience with Snowflake, Databricks, CDC tools such as Qlik or Fivetran, Kafka, data catalogs, and cloud RBAC technologies.
- Experience designing high-concurrency or sub-minute data platforms for risk, operational, trading, or industrial use cases.
- Experience with Kubernetes, containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and platform automation.
- Experience designing and operating reliable cloud environments with capacity planning, monitoring, backup/recovery, disaster recovery, workload isolation, and production support requirements.
- Experience with OT/IT data integration, PI historians, SCADA, time-series platforms, or industrial data management.
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