Principal Data Architect Chief Data Office

Wells Fargo is seeking a hands-on technologist who will shape modern data architecture across cloud and on-prem environments in a large-scale banking ecosystem. This role designs scalable patterns for application, analytics, workflow, and AI-enabled workloads while guiding the evolution of legacy systems into secure, resilient, and future-ready platforms. The ideal candidate balances strategy, design, and hands-on execution—proving concepts through code, solving complex data challenges, and influencing senior technologists.

About the role

You will work across diverse systems, define architectural patterns, and enable teams to modernize data environments with practical, AI-aware solutions. This role requires deep expertise in distributed data systems, application and workflow integration, and analytic platforms, along with the ability to translate current-state constraints into forward-looking architectures. Experience using both traditional development and AI-assisted engineering tools is key. Beyond technical leadership, you will mentor teams, align architecture to business outcomes, and communicate effectively with both technical and business stakeholders. Success in this role requires driving solutions that balance innovation with measurable value, including considerations of scalability, cost (TCO), and ROI.

Responsibilities

• Act as an advisor to senior leadership to develop the architectural framework and delivery for highly complex business and technical needs across multiple groups.
• Lead the strategy and resolution of highly complex and unique challenges requiring in-depth evaluation across multiple areas or the enterprise, delivering products and solutions that are long-term, large-scale, and require vision, creativity, innovation, advanced analytical, and inductive thinking.
• Provide vision, direction, and expertise to senior leadership on implementing the transformation strategy describing the current state, target state, and transition architecture.
• Develop and influence strategic plans, investment planning, and execution on cutover strategies to target.
• Strategically engage with all levels of professionals and managers across the enterprise and serve as an architectural domain expert advisor to leadership.
• Drive target investments toward target technologies and rationalize spend, total cost of ownership, and return on investment.
• Ensure applications adhere to established Wells Fargo standards, policies, methodologies, and industry best practices as they transform toward target state architecture.
• Drive the definition, establishment, and selection of strategic tools, and application of architecture frameworks.
• Maintain knowledge of industry best practices and new technologies and recommend innovations that enhance operations or provide a competitive advantage to the organization and can influence internal and vendor roadmaps in a significant capacity.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, database platforms, or enterprise technology roles, with significant experience in large-scale financial services or banking environments.
• 7+ years of designing enterprise-scale data architectures across hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises platforms.
• 7+ years of experience with relational, NoSQL, columnar, distributed, and shared-nothing database technologies.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to design scalable architectures using partitioning, sharding, replication, workload isolation, horizontal scaling, and distributed processing patterns.
• Experience architecting batch, streaming, event-driven, real-time, near-real-time, and API-based data integration patterns.
• Strong understanding of how application workloads, analytical workloads, reporting workloads, workflow engines, and AI/ML workloads interact with enterprise data platforms.
• Hands-on capability with technologies such as SQL, Python, Java, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, APIs, and modern data pipeline frameworks.
• Expertise in data modeling, including conceptual, logical, physical, dimensional, canonical, domain-driven, and event-based models.
• Strong knowledge of data security architecture, including encryption, tokenization, masking, access controls, entitlement models, secrets management, and audit logging.
• Ability to define and evaluate non-functional technical requirements, including latency, throughput, scalability, availability, resiliency, recovery, observability, security, and maintainability.
• Familiarity with designing data architectures that support AI, machine learning, feature engineering, model training, retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, and analytical workloads.
• Experience developing reference architectures, reusable design patterns, platform standards, technical guardrails, and implementation blueprints.

Job Expectations

• Ability to travel up to 10% of the time.
• Ability to work a hybrid work schedule - 3 days a week on-site/in office and 2 days a week remote.
• This position is not eligible for Visa sponsorship.

Locations: Charlotte, NC; Irving, TX; Minneapolis, MN; West Des Moines, IA

Pay

$159,000.00 - $279,000.00 base pay range. Pay may vary depending on factors including but not limited to demonstrated examples of prior performance, skills, experience, or work location. Employees may also be eligible for incentive opportunities.

Benefits

• Health benefits
• 401(k) Plan
• Paid time off
• Disability benefits
• Life insurance, critical illness insurance, and accident insurance
• Parental leave
• Critical caregiving leave
• Discounts and savings
• Commuter benefits
• Tuition reimbursement
• Scholarships for dependent children
• Adoption reimbursement