Data Architect Role

OpenDataJobs • Washington, DC

2h

About The Position

Data Architects shape how an organization represents, connects, governs, and uses data across systems. They translate business processes, information needs, and technical constraints into conceptual, logical, and physical models that teams can implement and evolve. The work spans relational databases, analytical platforms, data lakes, warehouses, and other fit-for-purpose stores. You assess a fragmented current state, define a target architecture, establish integration and access patterns, and decide where standardization matters most. Good decisions account for data shape, access patterns, scale, consistency, security, resilience, cost, and the realities of migration. This is a design and decision role. Data Architects work closely with data engineers, database developers, database administrators, security teams, software engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders. They make tradeoffs visible, preserve traceability from requirements to implementation, and help teams change an estate without losing integrity or control.

Requirements

• Experience with data modeling, schema design, normalization, dimensional modeling, and model evolution.
• Judgment across relational, analytical, document, graph, key-value, and vector-capable data stores.
• Understanding of integration patterns, data contracts, metadata, lineage, data quality, and governed access.
• Ability to evaluate architecture choices against security, resilience, performance, scalability, cost, and migration risk.
• Clear visual, written, and verbal communication across engineering, security, product, and business teams.

Nice To Haves

• Emphasis on a particular cloud platform, modeling tool, industry data standard, master data discipline, event-driven architecture, or modernization program.
• Hands-on SQL, infrastructure review, or experience guiding implementation across several delivery teams.
• Requirements for governed knowledge stores, vector-capable retrieval, model-access data boundaries, provenance, or auditability for AI programs.

Responsibilities

• Conceptual, logical, and physical data models for operational and analytical systems.
• Target-state architectures for warehouses, lakes, lakehouses, relational databases, and specialized stores.
• Canonical models, integration patterns, data contracts, naming standards, and schema conventions.
• Architecture decision records, transition roadmaps, and current-state or future-state diagrams.
• Governance-aware designs for metadata, lineage, access, retention, quality, and lifecycle management.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed