Data Architect

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Dallas / $170000 - $190000 annum

INFO

Salary

SALARY:

$170000 - $190000

Location

LOCATION

Dallas

Job Type
JOB TYPE

Permanent

Principal Data Architect

Location: Dallas
Work Model: Hybrid
Compensation: Up to 190K

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Principal Data Architect to help define the evolution of a large-scale enterprise data architecture-from understanding and documenting the current environment to designing and implementing the target state.

This is a highly influential, hands-on architecture role for someone who can operate across strategy and execution.

You will assess complex existing data ecosystems, identify gaps and constraints, define practical target-state architectures, and establish the reusable patterns, templates, and reference architectures that engineering teams will build upon.

This is not a role for an architect who only produces diagrams or slideware.

The successful candidate will be comfortable making detailed technical recommendations, validating architectural decisions, testing code and pipelines, and working directly with engineering teams to ensure that the architecture works in practice.

The role will help shape a modern data platform capable of supporting batch, near-real-time, and real-time data workloads, with increasing adoption of AI-driven capabilities including RAG, vector databases, and agentic AI.

A representative use case includes supporting highly time-sensitive and data-intensive business domains such as market risk, where data quality, latency, reliability, governance, and architectural scalability are critical.



What You'll Do

Assess the Current State

  • Analyze and document existing enterprise data architectures, platforms, pipelines, integrations, and data flows.
  • Establish a clear baseline understanding of current architecture, existing patterns, technical debt, gaps, and constraints.
  • Identify opportunities to simplify, standardize, automate, and improve reliability across the data ecosystem.
  • Work with engineering and business stakeholders to understand how data is currently produced, transformed, governed, and consumed.
  • Evaluate existing technical decisions and identify areas requiring modernization or redesign.

Define the Target State

  • Design future-state data architectures aligned to business objectives and long-term technology strategy.
  • Define practical interim architectures and transition states rather than assuming an immediate move from current state to an idealized end state.
  • Create phased migration roadmaps that balance business value, cost, technical risk, dependencies, and delivery timelines.
  • Present strategic execution options to senior technical and business stakeholders.
  • Clearly communicate trade-offs between competing approaches and make actionable recommendations.

Establish Reusable Architecture Patterns

  • Develop reference architectures for:
    • Batch data processing
    • Near-real-time data processing
    • Real-time and low-latency data flows
    • Event-driven architectures
    • Data integration and transformation
    • Data quality and governance
    • AI-enabled data platforms
  • Create reusable patterns, templates, standards, and architectural guidance that engineering teams can adopt.
  • Promote consistency across teams while allowing appropriate flexibility for different business and technical requirements.
  • Establish architectural principles and patterns that can scale across multiple domains and use cases.

Partner With Engineering

  • Work closely with Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, Product, Data Science, and AI teams.
  • Translate business objectives and product requirements into scalable technical architectures.
  • Provide detailed technical recommendations rather than purely conceptual designs.
  • Review and challenge proposed technical approaches.
  • Validate architectural decisions through hands-on technical investigation, proof-of-concepts, code reviews, and pipeline testing.
  • Where appropriate, contribute directly to implementation and technical validation.
  • Ensure architecture is practical, implementable, observable, secure, and scalable.

Enable Automation and Engineering Excellence

  • Promote automation across data architecture and engineering workflows.
  • Establish reusable CI/CD patterns for data pipelines and platform components.
  • Encourage infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, deployment automation, and repeatable engineering practices.
  • Help teams move from manually managed processes toward standardized and automated platforms.
  • Define patterns that enable engineering teams to build and deploy data products efficiently and reliably.

Drive Governance and Data Quality

  • Help define and implement enterprise data governance principles.
  • Establish patterns for data quality, lineage, ownership, observability, and lifecycle management.
  • Partner with stakeholders to improve the reliability, trustworthiness, and accessibility of enterprise data.
  • Ensure data governance and quality are integrated into the architecture and development lifecycle rather than treated as afterthoughts.


AI and Emerging Technology

AI is an important part of the organization's future data architecture.

You are not expected to have deep production experience with every emerging AI technology. However, you should understand how modern AI capabilities fit into broader enterprise data ecosystems.

Relevant areas include:

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Vector databases and vector search
  • Embeddings and semantic retrieval
  • Model integration and AI data pipelines
  • Agentic AI architectures
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP)
  • Data architectures supporting AI applications
  • AI-driven automation and intelligent workflows

You should be able to reason about questions such as:

  • Where should AI capabilities sit within the broader enterprise architecture?
  • How should data be structured, governed, and made available to AI systems?
  • When is a vector database appropriate?
  • How should real-time and batch data support AI applications?
  • How can AI capabilities be integrated into existing enterprise platforms without creating isolated point solutions?
  • What architectural patterns are required to support scalable RAG and agentic systems?

The most important requirement is the ability to understand the direction of travel and make sound architectural decisions as the technology evolves.

CONTACT

Mark Turp

Principal Recruitment Consultant

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