Associate Director Data Architecture

About the Role

At DTCC, data is a strategic asset that powers critical business capabilities across the global financial markets. As an Associate Director, Snowflake Platform Engineering, you will lead the strategy, engineering, reliability, and modernization of DTCC's enterprise Snowflake platform, enabling secure, scalable, and high-performing data solutions across a complex cloud data platform ecosystem. This is a highly visible, hands-on technical leadership role where you will define platform standards, drive modernization initiatives, strengthen resiliency, and deliver cloud-native architecture and platform engineering capabilities that support mission-critical applications and enterprise data products. You will collaborate closely with architecture, application development, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to ensure the platform remains innovative, resilient, secure, and optimized for future growth. The role requires a strong focus on platform governance, operational excellence, data security, compliance, and continuous improvement within a modern DataOps and DevOps environment.

Primary Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Architecture

• Own and continuously evolve DTCC's enterprise Snowflake platform strategy, architecture, roadmap, and operational excellence.
• Design and implement secure, scalable, highly available cloud-native architecture aligned with enterprise technology standards.
• Evaluate, adopt, and operationalize emerging Snowflake capabilities to improve performance optimization, automation, governance, and developer productivity.
• Establish platform governance, engineering standards, and best practices to drive secure and scalable platform adoption across multiple business domains.
• Drive platform scalability, workload optimization, and performance tuning initiatives supporting enterprise-scale workloads.
• Define and execute the Snowflake platform roadmap, aligning technology investments with business and enterprise architecture objectives.

Reliability, Automation & Operations

• Lead platform reliability engineering initiatives, including disaster recovery, business continuity, backup, failover, and recovery strategies.
• Build and enhance automation using Python, SQL, Bash, Terraform, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices.
• Design, implement, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to accelerate deployments, improve platform stability, and reduce operational risk.
• Define observability and monitoring standards using modern monitoring and telemetry practices to improve platform health, stability, and operational transparency.
• Drive operational excellence through proactive monitoring, automation, incident prevention, and continuous service improvement.
• Provide expert-level support for complex platform incidents and production issues, driving root-cause analysis and long-term remediation.

Partnership & Technical Leadership

• Serve as the primary Snowflake subject matter expert and trusted advisor for engineering teams across the organization.
• Partner with application, data engineering, architecture, security, and operations teams to support successful onboarding and adoption of enterprise platform services.
• Collaborate with Snowflake and strategic technology vendors to drive issue resolution, feature adoption, and platform innovation.
• Mentor engineers and promote a culture of technical excellence, continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and engineering best practices.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives across global teams to deliver scalable, secure, and business-aligned cloud data platform capabilities.
• Influence technical direction and champion platform engineering, DevOps, and DataOps best practices across the enterprise.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in Data Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Database Engineering, or related disciplines.
• Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise-scale cloud data platforms.
• Proven success leading complex technical initiatives in large-scale, highly regulated environments.

Required Skills

• Deep hands-on expertise in Snowflake platform engineering, administration, performance optimization, and platform governance.
• Strong understanding of data warehousing principles, dimensional modeling, and modern enterprise data ecosystem architectures.
• Experience designing and supporting enterprise-grade cloud solutions, preferably within AWS environments.
• Strong proficiency with Python, SQL, Bash, and scripting languages for automation and platform engineering.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines using GitLab, Jenkins, Bitbucket, or equivalent technologies.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code technologies including Terraform and Ansible.
• Strong knowledge of platform resiliency, disaster recovery, backup strategies, and operational readiness practices.
• Experience implementing data security, governance, access controls, and compliance standards within enterprise cloud data platforms.
• Strong understanding of workload management, resource optimization, and Snowflake cost optimization strategies.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and drive adoption of platform engineering best practices across multiple teams.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving capabilities.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working within Agile, DevOps, and DataOps environments supporting globally distributed teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• SnowPro Core and/or advanced Snowflake certifications.
• Experience with Snowpark, Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks, Dynamic Tables, Native Apps, and Cortex AI.
• Experience integrating Snowflake with enterprise identity, security, and compliance frameworks including Entra ID, HashiCorp Vault, and OAuth.
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana, Datadog, or similar tools.
• Knowledge of FinOps practices, cloud cost optimization, and resource consumption management within Snowflake environments.
• Experience supporting financial services, capital markets, or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience implementing enterprise-scale data governance and security frameworks.
• Experience with ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow and enterprise incident management processes.
• Familiarity with analytics and visualization tools including Power BI, QuickSight, Looker, or Tableau.
• Exposure to Azure and multi-cloud platform environments.

Pay and Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including base pay and annual incentive.
• Comprehensive health and life insurance and well-being benefits, based on location.
• Pension / Retirement benefits.
• Paid Time Off and Personal/Family Care, and other leaves of absence when needed to support your physical, financial, and emotional well-being.
• DTCC offers a flexible/hybrid model of 3 days onsite and 2 days remote (onsite Tuesdays, Wednesdays and a third day unique to each team or employee).