Data Architect

Further

$120K — $150K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years in data engineering or database architecture, with 3+ years leading architecture decisions.
  • Production experience with event-sourced systems, including envelope implementation and schema evolution.
  • Expertise in Postgres covering schema design, indexing, and query optimization.
  • Familiarity with streaming platforms like Kafka or Pulsar, with a solid understanding of topics and consumer groups.
  • Experience designing analytical data infrastructures in platforms like Snowflake or BigQuery for AI analytics.
  • Hands-on experience with AI/ML data infrastructures, including vector databases and retrieval systems.
  • Strong SQL proficiency, recognized as a go-to resource among peers.

Responsibilities

  • Define the canonical event envelope and manage schema evolution to support versioning and historical integrity.
  • Design the transactional data layer using Postgres with a focus on tenant isolation and indexing strategy.
  • Architect the read-side structure, including projection design and data query optimizations for analytics.
  • Oversee the AI/ML data infrastructure, focusing on vector storage and embedding pipeline efficiency.
  • Establish data governance standards, ensuring compliance with retention and deletion policies in multi-tenant environments.
  • Create and manage operational playbooks that guide data migrations and handle on-call engineering situations.

Benefits

  • Net-zero cost medical option with company HSA contributions.
  • Fertility support and fully-paid parental leave.
  • Monthly stipend for lifestyle spending.
  • Comprehensive total rewards program focused on well-being and peace of mind.
Full Job Description
Data Architect

You own the data spine of the platform: the canonical event envelope, the multi-tenant transactional store, the read-side projections that power every console view and API response, and the AI/ML data infrastructure that makes the system intelligent rather than just instrumented. This is not a specialist role. We are hiring one person who has done all three surfaces at production depth and can hold the trade-offs simultaneously. The data volume is significant, the schema evolution problem is hard, the tenant isolation requirements are unforgiving, and the AI workloads sit on top of all of it. If any of those three surfaces feel uninteresting, this isn't the role. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the Solution Architect on the canonical data model and with the Senior Developer on implementation. You write the migration playbooks, the upcaster chains, the projection rebuild procedures, and the runbooks that let us sleep at night. You will sit in our headquarters in Dallas, TX on a hybrid schedule. The team is in office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

What experience should you have:
  • 10+ years of data engineering, data platform, or database architecture experience, with at least 3 owning the architecture, not just the implementation.
  • Production experience with event-sourced systems. You have personally implemented or evolved an event envelope, dealt with the upcaster chain problem, and lived with the consequences of an early schema decision.
  • Deep Postgres expertise: schema design, indexing, query plan analysis, RLS. Not "I've used Postgres" but "I know what I'd do differently from the last team."
  • Experience with streaming platforms: Kafka, Redpanda, Pulsar, or Kinesis. You understand the difference between a topic, a partition, a consumer group, and a saga, and you've designed for all of them.
  • Production analytical data infrastructure experience: warehouse design (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, ClickHouse) or modern OLAP patterns. You can take an event log and produce a queryable shape that analysts and AI systems can actually use.
  • Hands-on AI/ML data infrastructure experience: vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant), embedding pipelines, retrieval patterns. You have shipped a RAG system that worked and you know why most of them don't.
  • Strong SQL, strong enough to be the person other engineers go to.

Nice to have
  • Drizzle, Prisma, or another modern TypeScript ORM at production depth.
  • Workflow engine experience (Temporal, Cadence, Airflow) and the data implications of long-running processes.
  • Background in feature stores, ML pipelines, or model evaluation infrastructure.
  • Semantic layer experience: dbt, Cube, or Malloy.
  • Compliance experience: SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, data residency. The audit story is part of the data story.
  • Open-source work or public writing on data architecture.

What you'll be doing in this role:
  • The canonical event envelope and schema evolution strategy: how events are versioned, how upcasters chain, how projections rebuild, and how we add fields without breaking history. You write the rules and enforce them in code review.
  • The transactional data layer: Postgres schema design, tenant isolation via row-level security, indexing strategy, query patterns, and migration discipline. Every table in a data plane carries a tenant_id and a policy. You make sure of that.
  • The read-side architecture: projection design, materialized views, semantic layer for downstream analytics and AI consumption. You decide how we move from event log to queryable shape and how that shape stays cheap to maintain.
  • The AI/ML data infrastructure: vector stores, embedding pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation patterns, feature stores where applicable, and the lineage that lets us trust what comes back.
  • Data governance: lineage, retention, deletion (right-to-be-forgotten in a multi-tenant event-sourced system is a real problem and you'll solve it), and the audit story for every piece of customer data we touch.
  • The operational playbook: projection rebuilds, replay procedures, schema migrations on hot data, vector index maintenance, capacity planning. If the data layer goes sideways at 2am, your runbook is what saves the on-call engineer

Our total rewards program is designed for your protection, peace of mind, and overall well-being. In addition to our outstanding basics, we offer a net-zero cost medical option, company contributions to your HSA, fertility support, fully-paid parental leave, a monthly stipend for your lifestyle spending account, and much more.

Apply today or check out all our opportunities!

#LI-Hybrid

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