Job Purpose

We're looking for a Data Architect who can do more than design schemas-someone who understands that the choices made early in a data platform's lifecycle shape what analysts, engineers, and business partners can realistically accomplish years later. This is a founding-architecture role: you'll be the primary strategist and builder of our enterprise data platform, working alongside a consulting partner and a wider data team.

The right person for this role will be equally comfortable whiteboarding a lakehouse topology with engineers and explaining a data access security model to a compliance stakeholder. You won't just hand off specs-you'll stay close to implementation, course-correct when reality diverges from design, and build the institutional knowledge that makes the platform durable.

Responsibilities

• Own the design of data models and structures for analytics purposes; collaborate with our consulting partner and internal team members to bring them to life and iterate based on what actually works in practice.
• Design data ingestion and transformation pipelines that are maintainable, observable, and appropriately documented-not just functional at launch.
• Define the security model for data access, with genuine attention to the intersection of data privacy requirements, compliance obligations, and the usability needs of internal teams.
• Lead tool evaluation and selection across ingestion, data lake, data governance, and data catalog-with a process that produces clear, reasoned recommendations, not just vendor comparisons.
• Ingest priority data sources into our data warehouse or lake and prepare them for analytical use, including validating that the data is trustworthy before downstream teams depend on it.

Requirements

• 3+ years working with cloud data architecture on AWS or Azure-specifically in the context of modern data platforms, not general cloud infrastructure.
• 3+ years producing architecture diagrams and data flow documentation using tools like Miro or Microsoft Visio clearly enough that both engineers and non-technical stakeholders can act on them.
• 2+ years leading tool evaluation and selection processes, including facilitating stakeholder input, managing vendor conversations, and producing written recommendations that hold up to scrutiny.
• Demonstrated expertise in ELT design and execution-you have real opinions about where transformation logic should live and why.
• Experience designing and managing modern data platforms including data lakes, data warehouses, and the pipelines that connect them.
• Strong analytical instincts: you can receive a raw data dump, understand its provenance and limitations, and identify what it will and won't support analytically.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with data visualization tools and an understanding of how modeling decisions upstream affect the experience of analysts downstream.
• Experience using Jira or a comparable tool for tracking architecture and engineering work over time.

Required Education

Bachelor's degree

Status

Full-time

Location

Remote

The expected base salary range for this position is $109,000-$119,000, however the offered salarymay be higher or lower than the above range dependent on numerous factors including, but not limited to location, work experience, skills and internal equity considerations. The base salary is not inclusive of benefits or other incentives.

A cover letter and resume are required to be considered for this position.

New employees will be required to successfully complete a background check.

Any communication to applicants relating to the Great Minds hiring process will only come from email addresses with the domains greatminds.org or greatminds.recruitee.com. If in the course of the application or hiring process with Great Minds you are contacted through another domain, are requested to provide banking or other sensitive information, or you note any other suspicious activity, please contact [redacted]

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