Senior Principal Data Architect

About the role

The Principal Data Architect - Multi-Modal Ingestion & Intelligent Lakehouse Platforms (GCP) is a senior technical leadership role focused on defining and delivering next-generation data architecture capabilities for HCA Healthcare's enterprise data ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Define and own enterprise-scale data architecture patterns for multi-modal ingestion and Lakehouse platforms on Google Cloud Platform.
• Architect and evolve document-centric and unstructured data pipelines that support ingestion, enrichment, embedding, indexing, storage, and retrieval at scale.
• Leverage LLMs and advanced techniques to design intelligent ingestion frameworks.
• Establish architectural standards for cost-optimized, high-throughput ingestion across batch, streaming, and event-driven workloads.
• Drive platform designs that support search, analytics, and downstream AI/ML use cases in partnership with the AI/ML organization.
• Architect and manage enterprise Lakehouse environments using technologies such as BigQuery, Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and GCS.
• Optimize storage and compute usage to balance performance and cost across large-scale document and data repositories.
• Design data models and access patterns that support both analytical and AI-driven workloads.
• Design and oversee ETL/ELT and ingestion pipelines using Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, GKE, and related services.
• Integrate AI/ML services into ingestion and processing pipelines for document understanding and content intelligence in partnership with the AI/ML practice area.
• Ensure ingestion frameworks are resilient, observable, and designed for continuous evolution.
• Define and enforce best practices for data governance, security, privacy, and compliance (HIPAA, GDPR) across structured and unstructured data.
• Participate in and lead architectural design reviews to ensure adherence to standards and patterns.
• Collaborate with business, clinical, analytics, and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable architectural solutions.
• Provide architectural guidance for cloud migrations and modernization initiatives involving document and data platforms.
• Maintain a holistic view of enterprise information assets through diagrams, reference architectures, and technical roadmaps.
• Act as a technical mentor and advisor to senior engineers and architects.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, related technical field, or equivalent experience required.
• Master's degree in computer science or related field preferred.
• 7+ years of experience in Healthcare.
• 15+ years of experience in Information Technology.
• Deep experience designing enterprise data architectures on Google Cloud Platform or other Cloud Service Providers.
• Hands-on expertise with GCP (or similar cloud platform like Azure or AWS) services, including: BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Functions, Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner.
• Strong knowledge of Lakehouse technologies and formats: Iceberg, Delta Lake, Parquet, Avro, JSON.
• Experience with document and unstructured data processing, including ingestion, enrichment, and indexing.
• Practical experience integrating LLMs and AI frameworks (e.g., Vertex AI, LangChain, embeddings, RAG patterns) into data pipelines.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and JVM-based languages (Java/Scala).
• Experience with CI/CD, DevOps, and infrastructure-as-code for data platforms.
• Strong understanding of data security, privacy, and regulatory requirements in cloud environments.
• Ability to analyze complex problems, modernize legacy pipelines, and design scalable solutions.
• Ability to communicate complex architectures clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.