Architect of Data Architecture

About the role

The Data Architect plays a crucial role in shaping Empower's cloud and data architecture. They collaborate with various teams to design and implement scalable, secure, and cost-effective solutions. This role requires a deep understanding of data engineering, cloud technologies, and modernization initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Partner with enterprise architects, senior architects, and cross-functional teams to shape solution architectures aligned with a unified IT data strategy.
• Contribute to Empower's technology roadmap by documenting target state architectures, reference architectures, and key dependencies for supported initiatives.
• Design and support modernization and migration of complex systems to scalable, secure, and cost-optimized cloud architectures, working with delivery teams through implementation.
• Evaluate and prototype new technologies and applications, challenge existing approaches constructively, and provide input into business cases and recommendations.
• Apply and help operationalize architectural standards, best practices, and governance expectations, supporting consistent adoption through guidance and enablement.
• Collaborate closely with business and engineering teams to design end-to-end solutions that meet strategic, technical, and operational objectives.
• Provide architectural guidance in process design, system orchestration, and enterprise integration to enable cohesive and efficient technology ecosystems.
• Champion security, resilience, and scalability as core design principles across data platforms and data solutions.
• Contribute to architecture discipline maturity by producing reusable patterns, decision documentation, and lessons learned that improve consistency and delivery speed.
• Support full stack development teams through solution design and implementation, improving long-term scalability, performance, and cost outcomes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s and/or master’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• At least 5 years of experience delivering data-intensive solutions, for example in data engineering, analytics engineering, data platforms, BI, or related roles.
• At least 1 year of demonstrated solution design ownership for moderately complex initiatives, gained as an architect or as a senior engineer or technical lead responsible for end-to-end design, architectural trade-offs, and guiding implementation.
• Proven experience in multiple data-focused roles, including Data Engineer, ETL/ELT, Data Architect, Database Administrator, BI or Analytics Engineer, Data Science, data governance, or a similar field.
• Competency in architecture frameworks, performance optimization, and addressing cross-cutting concerns including availability, caching, monitoring, scalability, and security.
• Strong problem-solving and strategic thinking, with the ability to influence cross-functional teams and communicate architecture decisions clearly in distributed environments.
• Strong expertise in designing data and cloud architecture, AWS preferred, supporting scalability, performance, and security with systems such as Snowflake or Redshift.
• Proven ability to translate complex data into actionable business insights and reporting solutions that provide comprehensive and up-to-date information to business users.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

• Data engineering experience designing and delivering ETL and ELT pipelines, including orchestration, data quality controls, and reliable operations for batch and near real-time workloads.
• Streaming and event-driven data experience building and operating Kafka or Kinesis-based architectures, including ordering, replay, schema evolution, and real-time observability.
• API and integration experience designing API-first data access patterns, API lifecycle governance, versioning, security, and developer enablement, plus event-driven integration patterns to reduce point-to-point complexity.
• Data platform modernization experience designing large-scale ingestion and processing platforms using Spark or comparable distributed compute and orchestrating reliable batch and near real-time pipelines.
• Data security and privacy experience implementing encryption, masking or tokenization, access controls, and auditability patterns for sensitive data and regulated environments.
• Cloud cost and performance experience applying FinOps practices, workload right sizing, storage optimization, and performance engineering for cloud data platforms.
• DevOps for data experience building CI/CD for data pipelines, infrastructure as code practices, and container platforms such as Kubernetes or EKS for data workloads.
• Applied AI and GenAI experience designing safe enterprise patterns for retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, and responsible AI adoption.
• Broad polyglot engineering experience with Java, microservices patterns, and third-party API integrations that support data-intensive services.
• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate or Professional.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Roth and Traditional 401(k) plans with generous company matching contributions (up to 6%)
• Financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year
• Business-casual environment that includes the option to wear jeans
• Generous paid time off upon hire – including a paid time off program plus ten paid company holidays and three floating holidays each calendar year
• Paid volunteer time – 16 hours per calendar year
• Leave of absence programs – including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Business Resource Groups (BRGs) – BRGs facilitate inclusion and collaboration across our business internally and throughout the communities where we live, work and play. BRGs are open to all.

Pay

• Base Salary Range: $114,000.00 - $165,300.00

Schedule

• This role operates in a professional office environment.