Principal Architect

Key Responsibilities

• Arcitectural & Platform Leadership
• Own the enterprise architecture for the Azure-based data platform, including Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Delta Lake, and Power BI.
• Define and maintain platform architecture standards, reference patterns, and future-state roadmaps aligned to business strategy.
• Ensure the platform enables analytics, reporting, and AI/ML workloads at enterprise scale.
• Data-as-a-Product Operating Model
• Establish and govern Data-as-a-Product standards including ownership, SLAs, documentation, metadata, lineage, and quality requirements.
• Partner with Product Owners and domain teams to enable scalable data product delivery.
• Team & Vendor Leadership
• Lead and coordinate all onsite and offshore resources supporting the Operational Data Platform, including L1–L3 support, data engineering, analytics, and platform operations teams.
• Act as the single architectural and operational authority for a hybrid delivery model spanning onshore leadership and offshore execution teams.
• Define clear roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, and RACI frameworks across vendors and internal teams.
• Hold managed service providers accountable for SLAs, security standards, architectural compliance, and operational excellence.
• Data Operations & Reliability
• Own the Data Ops operating model including incident management, change governance, release coordination, and production support.
• Establish severity-based support coverage and on-call models.
• Lead root cause analysis initiatives and drive continuous platform reliability improvements.
• Governance, Security & Compliance
• Define and enforce governance standards for RBAC, data masking, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and audit readiness.
• Ensure SOX and privacy controls are embedded in platform architecture and operations.
• Serve as technical authority during audits by providing architectural artifacts and operational evidence.
• Observability & Continuous Improvement
• Define the observability strategy for pipeline health, data quality, platform metrics, cost telemetry, and SLA enforcement.
• Champion Data Reliability Engineering practices and proactive monitoring.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data, platform, or enterprise architecture roles.
• 3+ years designing and operating cloud-native data platforms (Azure strongly preferred).
• Deep expertise in Azure Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Power BI, and Data Ops practices.
• Experience leading onsite and offshore teams within managed services or hybrid delivery models.
• Strong background in governance, security, and regulated environments (SOX).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; Master’s degree preferred.