We are hiring a Principal Data Architect to define and drive our enterprise data architecture vision, centered on a domain-oriented data mesh. You will set the technical direction for how data is owned, produced, discovered and consumed across the company, and you will turn that direction into a multi-year roadmap that business and engineering leaders can fund and follow.
This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role. You will partner with domain teams, platform engineering, security and the executive team to move from centralized, pipeline-driven data delivery to federated ownership of data as a product, supported by a self-serve platform and computational governance.
What You'll Do
Architecture and technical direction- Define the target-state data architecture built on data mesh principles: domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve data infrastructure and federated computational governance.
- Establish domain boundaries and ownership models with business and engineering leaders, using domain-driven design and bounded contexts.
- Design reference architectures for data products, including ingestion, storage, transformation, serving (batch, streaming and API), and consumption patterns.
- Specify data product standards: interfaces, SLAs and SLOs, schemas and contracts, metadata, lineage, quality checks and access policies.
- Guide the design of the self-serve data platform so domain teams can build, publish and operate data products with minimal friction.
Vision and roadmap- Own the multi-year data architecture vision and a phased roadmap covering pilot domains, platform capabilities, migration of legacy warehouse and lake assets, and decommissioning.
- Build the business case and investment narrative for executive stakeholders, including trade-offs, sequencing, risks and expected value.
- Create a maturity model and adoption plan that meets domains where they are and tracks progress over time.
Governance and standards- Design federated governance: shared policies for security, privacy, quality, interoperability and cataloging that are automated and enforced in the platform rather than through manual review.
- Define enterprise canonical models, shared reference data and cross-domain interoperability patterns where they add value.
- Partner with security, privacy and compliance teams on regulatory requirements (for example GDPR, CCPA, SOX, HIPAA as applicable).
Leadership and influence- Chair the architecture review forum and act as the escalation point for cross-domain design decisions.
- Mentor architects and senior engineers, and coach domain teams in data product thinking.
- Evaluate and select technologies, run proofs of concept, and publish clear architecture decision records.
- Represent the data architecture vision internally and, where relevant, to customers, partners and industry peers.
What You Bring
- 12+ years in data architecture, data engineering or platform architecture, with at least 3 years in a principal, staff or enterprise architect role.
- Demonstrated experience designing or leading a data mesh, data product or domain-oriented data architecture, ideally through at least one production rollout.
- Deep knowledge of modern data stack patterns: cloud data warehouses and lakehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift or similar), open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), streaming (Kafka, Flink, Spark Structured Streaming) and orchestration.
- Strong data modeling skills across dimensional, data vault, event-driven and domain models, and the judgment to know when each fits.
- Hands-on experience with data contracts, schema management, metadata and catalog tooling, lineage, and data quality and observability frameworks.
- Working command of governance, security and privacy architecture, including policy-as-code, fine-grained access control, and data classification.
- Proven ability to translate architecture into a roadmap and business case, and to win support from executives and engineering leaders.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to make complex trade-offs clear to non-technical audiences.
- Experience on at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and fluency in SQL and at least one general-purpose language such as Python, Scala or Java.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Annual Salary$136,325.00 - $212,175.00
The above annual salary range is a general guideline. Multiple factors are taken into consideration to arrive at the final hourly rate/ annual salary to be offered to the selected candidate. Factors include, but are not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the role, the selected candidate27s work experience, education and training, the work location as well as market and business considerations.
GEICO will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position.
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