Job OverviewWe're looking for a Senior Data Platform Architect to design, administer, and secure the Azure Databricks platform that powers digital and marketing, finance, revenue management, and booking and reservations. You will lead North America platform administration, including Unity Catalog governance, access, pipeline reliability, and cost. You will also set the standard for safe, AI-assisted coding across the data team.
This is a hybrid position based in our Woodland Hills, Los Angeles office. You will be required to adhere to our hybrid work policy, working from our office Monday and Thursday plus one additional weekday on a weekly basis.
Job Responsibilities:Platform Architecture - Design the medallion architecture, including catalog and schema design, layer contracts, and the promotion path.
- Align platform design with enterprise security and networking standards.
- Bridge Data Solutions and Infrastructure so BI, AI, data science, and activation teams can build on your decisions.
Databricks and Unity Catalog Administration - Administer Unity Catalog: catalog, external locations, credentials, grants, and service principals.
- Set workspace and compute standards.
- Manage identity: users, groups, SCIM provisioning from Entra ID, secret scopes, and token governance.
Ingestion, Orchestration, and Integration - Design pipelines across Azure Data Factory and Databricks Workflows.
- Maintain source integrations and their credential lifecycles.
- Establish data contracts with upstream owners.
- Land a SQL Server to Databricks modernization decision without breaking existing reporting.
AI-Assisted Engineering Standards - Set and enforce the AI coding standard.
- Build and maintain the AI coding harness.
- Establish review practices for generated code and SQL, correctness, cost and performance impact
Security, Access, and Governance - Define the security posture: network isolation, private connectivity, and storage firewalls.
- Run credential hygiene: secrets in Key Vault, scheduled rotation, and no long-lived plaintext tokens.
- Design the access model: roles, and privileged access.
- Partner with Infrastructure to manage configuration in Terraform and CI/CD.
Reliability, Quality, and Cost - Define SLAs for critical pipelines and build the monitoring and alerting to prove they are met.
- Lead incident response through triage, root cause, remediation, and a written RCA that drives change.
- Monitor platform spend: cluster right-sizing, storage lifecycle, and cost per workload.
Job Requirements:- Strong end-to-end data platform experience across architecture, administration, and production operations.
- Databricks Design and Administration (Expert): hands-on with Unity Catalog , cluster policy, workspace configuration, and identity federation, beyond notebook development.
- SQL (Expert): complex analytical queries, optimization, and performance tuning.
- Python (Advanced): production-grade PySpark with strong data quality and testing practices.
- Azure (Strong): ADLS Gen2, Data Factory, Entra ID, Key Vault, private connectivity, and RBAC design.
- Infrastructure as Code (Working Knowledge): Terraform and Git-based CI/CD.
- Proven ownership of a production platform.
- Data governance and access control experience, including privacy or consent handling across multiple markets.
- Ability to explain design trade-offs to engineers and business stakeholders.
Nice to Have:- Snowflake, Synapse, or Microsoft Fabric operated alongside Databricks.
- MLOps with Databricks Asset Bundles, plus drift and quality monitoring over inference tables.
- Experience retiring a legacy SQL Server estate without breaking downstream reports.
- dbt or a similar framework for layered models and testing.
- Databricks or Azure certification (Data Engineer Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert).
- Prior platform owner or technical lead experience.
What We Offer You:- Highly competitive compensation plan.
- Salary range $220,000-$250,000 annually determined by a myriad of factors including, but not limited to, years of experience, depth of experience, and other relevant business considerations.
- Employees are eligible for annual discretionary bonus.
- 401(k) plan with company match.
- Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP) Viking full-time regular employees working in the United States can purchase Viking shares through payroll deductions.
- Full benefits including medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance at a highly subsidized rate (some plans are fully paid by Viking).
- Accrue 15 paid vacation days, sick time accrual by state, and 6 paid holidays per year.
- Opportunity to take a free and/or discounted cruise.
- Highly subsidized gym membership.
- Discounts on theatres, theme parks, movie tickets, travel discounts through IATA membership and too many more discounts to name.
