Data Architect

Further•Dallas, TX

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

WE’RE HIRING! If you love data and are looking for unlimited growth opportunities, we want to talk with you about joining Further. Further is a data, cloud, and AI company whose focus is helping companies turn raw data into the right decisions. We have an award winning culture of extraordinary people. Our purpose is to enable people to thrive so that businesses can thrive. We believe that the work you do should matter - it should be meaningful to you professionally and personally, and it should have a positive impact on both you and our clients. If this sounds exciting to you, let’s chat!

Requirements

10+ years of data engineering, data platform, or database architecture experience, with at least 3 owning the architecture, not just the implementation.
Production experience with event-sourced systems. You have personally implemented or evolved an event envelope, dealt with the upcaster chain problem, and lived with the consequences of an early schema decision.
Deep Postgres expertise: schema design, indexing, query plan analysis, RLS.
Experience with streaming platforms: Kafka, Redpanda, Pulsar, or Kinesis. You understand the difference between a topic, a partition, a consumer group, and a saga, and you've designed for all of them.
Production analytical data infrastructure experience: warehouse design (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, ClickHouse) or modern OLAP patterns. You can take an event log and produce a queryable shape that analysts and AI systems can actually use.
Hands-on AI/ML data infrastructure experience: vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant), embedding pipelines, retrieval patterns. You have shipped a RAG system that worked and you know why most of them don't.
Strong SQL, strong enough to be the person other engineers go to.
Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
The company does not anticipate providing sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B, TN, etc.) for this individual position.

Nice To Haves

Drizzle, Prisma, or another modern TypeScript ORM at production depth.
Workflow engine experience (Temporal, Cadence, Airflow) and the data implications of long-running processes.
Background in feature stores, ML pipelines, or model evaluation infrastructure.
Semantic layer experience: dbt, Cube, or Malloy.
Compliance experience: SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, data residency.
Open-source work or public writing on data architecture.

Responsibilities

Own the data spine of the platform: the canonical event envelope, the multi-tenant transactional store, the read-side projections that power every console view and API response, and the AI/ML data infrastructure.
Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the Solution Architect on the canonical data model and with the Senior Developer on implementation.
Write the migration playbooks, the upcaster chains, the projection rebuild procedures, and the runbooks that let us sleep at night.
Define the canonical event envelope and schema evolution strategy: how events are versioned, how upcasters chain, how projections rebuild, and how we add fields without breaking history.
Design the transactional data layer: Postgres schema design, tenant isolation via row-level security, indexing strategy, query patterns, and migration discipline.
Define the read-side architecture: projection design, materialized views, semantic layer for downstream analytics and AI consumption.
Build the AI/ML data infrastructure: vector stores, embedding pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation patterns, feature stores where applicable, and the lineage that lets us trust what comes back.
Manage data governance: lineage, retention, deletion (right-to-be-forgotten in a multi-tenant event-sourced system is a real problem and you'll solve it), and the audit story for every piece of customer data we touch.
Develop the operational playbook: projection rebuilds, replay procedures, schema migrations on hot data, vector index maintenance, capacity planning.