Azure Data Architect-Only W2/1099

Role: AZURE Data Architect
Cloud Environment: AZURE
Location: Manhattan, NY (Hybrid 3 days a week to office)

Role Summary: Defines and governs the data architecture for the engagement onsite, ensuring scalable, secure and well-modeled data platforms that support analytics and AI use cases.

Key Responsibilities
• Design enterprise data architecture, including data models, pipelines, storage and integration patterns
• Define data standards, governance, lineage and quality practices
• Evaluate and select data platform technologies in line with client strategy
• Partner with AI Architect and Data Engineers to enable ML and AI workloads
• Review designs and code for performance, security and scalability
• Document architecture decisions and present to technical and business stakeholders
• Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and regulatory requirements
• Guide and mentor the offshore data team

Required Qualifications
• 10+ years in data architecture, engineering, or analytics
• Deep expertise in data modeling (relational, dimensional, lakehouse)
• Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms (Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform) and tools such as Databricks, Snowflake or Synapse
• Strong SQL and familiarity with Python
• Experience with data governance, MDM, and data quality frameworks
• Excellent communication with technical and business audiences
• Cloud architect or data certification preferred. 

Key Skills: Data modeling | Cloud data platforms | ETL / ELT design | Data governance | SQL / Python | Solution architecture