Principal Architect, People Data Governance

About the role

This role will be based in Sunnyvale/Mountain View (Headquarters), Bellevue, Chicago, Carpinteria, Detroit, New York City, Omaha, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the architecture strategy and roadmap for people data governance across the People Analytics ecosystem.
• Translate governance objectives into scalable technical designs, implementation approaches, and architecture standards.
• Design enterprise frameworks for metadata management, data lineage, stewardship, certification, access governance, and lifecycle management.
• Establish architecture patterns that improve data quality, trust, consistency, discoverability, and accountability across workforce data domains.
• Design and implement automated data quality capabilities, including monitoring, anomaly detection, validation frameworks, SLA tracking, and remediation workflows.
• Define standards for metadata management, business glossaries, lineage tracking, cataloging, and governance workflows.
• Lead architecture decisions related to governance tooling, including metadata management, data quality, observability, catalog, lineage, and master data management platforms.
• Partner with HR Technology, Data Engineering, Security, Privacy, Legal, and AI teams to align governance requirements with enterprise architecture standards.
• Define governance-by-design principles that embed quality, lineage, metadata, and stewardship directly into data platforms and engineering workflows.
• Arcitect solutions that make governance artifacts, metadata, lineage, business definitions, policies, and certified data assets accessible for analytics and AI-enabled solutions.
• Evaluate emerging governance, metadata, AI, and data management technologies and recommend adoption strategies where appropriate.
• Provide technical leadership across governance initiatives and offer architectural guidance to engineering teams, contractors, and implementation partners.
• Develop reusable governance frameworks, reference architectures, standards, templates, and operational models that scale across the enterprise.

Qualifications

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Analytics, Data Management, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, data governance, data platforms, or related disciplines.
• Experience designing governance architectures supporting metadata management, lineage, stewardship, data quality, access controls, and lifecycle management.
• Experience implementing solutions on Databricks or comparable cloud-based data platforms.
• Proficiency in SQL and Python or PySpark, including development of production data workflows and automation capabilities.
• Experience designing and implementing automated, metadata-driven data quality frameworks that include validation rules, monitoring, anomaly detection, SLA management, and remediation processes.
• Experience implementing metadata management, data cataloging, lineage, or master data management capabilities.
• Experience partnering with engineering, platform, and architecture teams to design and deliver technical solutions.
• Experience supporting AI, GenAI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic AI, or related data architecture initiatives.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this role is $121,000-$201,000. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. This may be different in other locations due to differences in the cost of labor. The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For more information, visit here.

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