Position purpose The Senior Azure / Snowflake Data Platform Architect will define the target-state architecture, engineering standards, security model, environment strategy, and operational governance for The Specialty Alliance's enterprise data platform. The role is intended for a physician-led, multi-specialty MSO that depends on shared services, analytics, and scalable enterprise infrastructure while preserving autonomy across affiliated practices.
This architect will lead design decisions spanning Azure cloud services, Snowflake platform architecture, identity and access patterns, data integration, resiliency, cost governance, observability, and platform enablement. The role is particularly important as TSA builds a cloud-native data foundation capable of supporting enterprise analytics, revenue-accounting automation, practice onboarding, AI-ready semantic layers, and future specialty expansion.
The primary purpose of the role is to create a secure, scalable, governed, and cost-disciplined Azure and Snowflake platform that can support multiple data products and enterprise use cases. This role provides the architectural guardrails and platform patterns that allow delivery teams to build faster without sacrificing security, auditability, performance, or maintainability.
Responsibilities/Duties/Functions/Tasks:
- Define the target-state architecture for TSA's Azure and Snowflake data platform, including environment strategy, logical and physical architecture, data domains, platform boundaries, and reference patterns.
- Design Snowflake account, database, schema, warehouse, storage, and workload-isolation strategies that support secure multi-domain growth and predictable performance.
- Establish enterprise identity, access, and security architecture, including RBAC, least privilege, separation of duties, SSO, service principals, data masking, network policies, secrets handling, and privileged-access controls.
- Define standards for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, metadata, lineage, semantic modeling, observability, disaster recovery, and production support.
- Architect resilient platform patterns for practice onboarding, acquisitions, source-system integration, cross-domain data sharing, and controlled release management.
- Lead platform cost governance and FinOps practices, including workload attribution, warehouse optimization, cost visibility, environment sizing, retention strategies, and usage monitoring.
- Partner with engineering leaders to establish infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, environment promotion, and automated provisioning patterns for Snowflake and Azure services.
- Define disaster recovery, replication, backup, failover, and business-continuity strategies for platform-critical workloads.
- Support data governance by aligning platform design to stewardship, classification, lineage, privacy, and retention requirements.
- Provide technical leadership and architectural review for enterprise initiatives such as revenue accounting, enterprise analytics, interoperability, master data, and AI-enabled data products.
- Evaluate emerging platform capabilities, including AI-ready semantic layers, governed search, and agentic or natural-language analytics patterns, and determine practical enterprise use cases.
- Mentor engineers, administrators, and architects and serve as the architectural escalation point for platform design tradeoffs and complex technical decisions.
Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, mathematics, or a related field; equivalent practical experience considered.
- 10+ years of experience in enterprise data architecture, data platform engineering, database architecture, or related disciplines.
- Deep expertise in Snowflake platform architecture, administration, security, performance optimization, workload design, and operational governance.
- Strong experience with Microsoft Azure services relevant to enterprise data platforms, identity, networking, security, and automation.
- Proven experience designing RBAC and security-governance models, including SSO, access controls, least-privilege patterns, masking, and policy-driven architecture.
- Experience defining production standards for observability, disaster recovery, replication, failover, and operational support.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code, automated provisioning, CI/CD, Git-based workflows, and environment promotion practices.
- Strong understanding of performance tuning, workload isolation, data-sharing models, metadata, lineage, and platform cost optimization.
- Ability to communicate architecture decisions clearly to engineering, security, finance, and executive stakeholders.
Preferred qualifications - Healthcare-provider, MSO, physician-practice, payer, or regulated-services experience.
- Experience building or modernizing Snowflake platforms in environments with multiple business units, domains, or acquired entities.
- Experience supporting financial, revenue-cycle, clinical, or other audit-sensitive enterprise data workloads.
- Familiarity with Azure AD or Microsoft Entra ID, SAML/SSO, SCIM, network security, and enterprise identity integration.
- Experience with FinOps, chargeback or showback models, usage attribution, and cost-optimization dashboards.
- Experience with semantic layers, governed self-service analytics, natural-language interfaces, or AI-ready platform patterns.
- Experience with Terraform, Python, SQL, shell scripting, monitoring frameworks, and platform automation.
- Snowflake certifications and Azure certifications strongly preferred.
Performance Requirements: - Self-managed or need little supervision
- Persistence in staying on task to solve technical problems
- Flexibility and initiative
- Accountability for own schedule and reporting on activities
- Conceptual thinking
Equipment Operated: This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, and fax machines.
Work Environment: This job operates in professional office environments.
Physical Requirements: While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; sit; use hands to finger, handle, or feel objects, tools or controls; reach with hands and arms; climb stairs; balance; stoop, kneel, crouch or crawl; talk or hear; and taste or smell. The employee must occasionally lift or move up to 50 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by the job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception and the ability to adjust focus.
