Sr. Architect | Data & Analytics/Databricks/Snowflakes (Remote)

Role Summary

Trace3 is seeking a Data Architect to join the Data and Analytics Services team. This role combines hands-on architecture, technical leadership, consulting, and delivery responsibility. The Data Architect will help clients design, modernize, govern, and operationalize data platforms that support analytics, artificial intelligence, reporting, and business decision-making.

The ideal candidate can move comfortably between executive conversations, architecture workshops, detailed technical design, and delivery oversight. You will establish practical architecture standards, guide engineering teams, evaluate platform trade-offs, and help ensure that solutions are secure, scalable, maintainable, and aligned to business outcomes.

This is a client-facing role with responsibility for both solution quality and team enablement.

Architecture and solution design

• Lead the design of modern data architectures across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.
• Translate business, information, analytics, and AI requirements into durable technical architectures and implementation roadmaps.
• Define patterns for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, storage, modeling, serving, governance, security, and observability.
• Design lakehouse, data warehouse, data mesh, data product, and hybrid architectures as appropriate to client needs.
• Establish clear separation of responsibilities across raw, refined, curated, and consumption layers.
• Define standards for dimensional modeling, semantic models, master and reference data, slowly changing dimensions, data quality, lineage, and metadata.
• Evaluate architecture options and communicate trade-offs using clear decision criteria, risks, and consequences.
• Produce architecture diagrams, standards, reference architectures, technical designs, and implementation plans.

Data platform expertise

• Bring hands-on experience with at least two of the following platforms: Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric.
• Apply platform-native capabilities effectively, including Snowflake data engineering and governance, Databricks Lakehouse and Unity Catalog, or Microsoft Fabric OneLake, Data Factory, and Power BI integration.
• Assess platform fit and recommend appropriate technologies based on business requirements, operating model, skills, cost, performance, security, and time to value.
• Establish scalable patterns for batch, streaming, event-driven, and incremental data processing.
• Design for performance, resiliency, cost transparency, and operational supportability.
• Guide teams in productionizing notebooks, pipelines, SQL, Python, reusable frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Define environment promotion and CI/CD practices across development, test, and production environments.

Client delivery and consulting

• Facilitate discovery sessions, architecture workshops, design reviews, and stakeholder working sessions.
• Build trusted relationships with client executives, technology leaders, data leaders, engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders.
• Lead current-state assessments and maturity evaluations, then develop prioritized recommendations and roadmaps.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Contribute to proposals, statements of work, estimates, presentations, demonstrations, and solution shaping.
• Identify delivery risks early and partner with project and client leadership to resolve them.
• Ensure architecture decisions remain connected to measurable client outcomes, adoption plans, and delivery realities.

Technical leadership and enablement

• Provide technical direction to data engineers, analytics engineers, architects, analysts, and client teams.
• Lead architecture reviews and design governance throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers and architects through coaching, pairing, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Create reusable accelerators, templates, standards, playbooks, and service offerings for the Data and Analytics practice.
• Promote engineering practices that reduce technical debt, improve maintainability, and enable teams to operate solutions independently.
• Help shape Trace3’s data architecture capabilities, methodologies, and go-to-market offerings.

Governance, security, and operations

• Incorporate data security, privacy, access control, compliance, retention, and responsible data use into architecture decisions.
• Design governance models that balance centralized standards with practical delivery autonomy.
• Establish approaches for data quality monitoring, lineage, cataloging, documentation, and stewardship.
• Define operational requirements for monitoring, alerting, incident response, disaster recovery, and service-level objectives.
• Evaluate and improve platform cost management, capacity planning, workload isolation, and resource utilization.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, analytics engineering, or a related technical consulting role.
• Hands-on production experience with at least two of these three data platforms: Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric.
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering enterprise or large-scale cloud data platforms.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, data integration, lakehouse and warehouse patterns, analytics architecture, and data governance.
• Proficiency with SQL and Python, including the ability to review and guide production-quality code.
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration, CI/CD, source control, automated testing, and environment promotion.
• Experience leading architecture workshops, technical design sessions, or complex delivery initiatives.
• Ability to explain technical decisions, alternatives, risks, and business impact to varied audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor technical teams and establish repeatable engineering standards.
• Willingness and ability to travel periodically for client engagements, team meetings, or industry events.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with all three target platforms: Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric.
• Experience with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud data services.
• Familiarity with Power BI, dbt, Kafka, Event Hubs, Airflow, Azure Data Factory, Terraform, Kubernetes, or comparable technologies.
• Experience implementing data products, semantic layers, master data, metadata, data catalogs, or data contracts.
• Experience with AI-ready data foundations, machine learning platforms, generative AI, or agent-consumable data architectures.
• Experience with FinOps, workload optimization, platform operating models, or managed data services.
• Relevant certifications in Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, data management, or enterprise architecture.
• Experience in a professional services, systems integration, or client-facing consulting environment.

What success looks like

During the first year, the Data Architect will:

• Earn trust with clients and delivery teams as a practical, outcome-oriented technical leader.
• Deliver architecture recommendations that are adopted and successfully translated into implementation plans.
• Improve consistency through reusable patterns, templates, standards, and reference architectures.
• Help teams deliver secure, scalable, observable, and cost-conscious data solutions.
• Strengthen Trace3’s expertise across Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric.
• Mentor technical resources and raise the quality of architecture and engineering decisions across engagements.
• Contribute to new offerings, proposals, and client conversations that grow the Data and Analytics Services practice.