Director, Data Architecture

Colgate • Piscataway, NJ

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Colgate-Palmolive is seeking a senior data architecture leader to define, design, and govern data assets across the Enterprise Data Applications organization within Global IT. The role leads and mentors architects and engineers responsible for Finance, Supply Chain, Global Technology (R&D), Sustainability, and Master Data domains, setting architectural direction and engineering standards while ensuring data is consistent, high-quality, secure, and accessible for enterprise initiatives.

The Director translates business goals into a forward-looking data architecture roadmap, owns the lifecycle of logical and physical data models, and defines reliable, documented, standardized, and interoperable data products. The role implements enterprise governance standards, including data quality, privacy controls, metadata, lineage, and security. As design authority, the Director also optimizes pipelines and Snowflake resource consumption for scalable, cost-efficient solutions.

The position works closely with senior business stakeholders, delivery leads, data engineers, data scientists, enterprise architects, and the Central Data Platform Team. It establishes modeling and transformation conventions, reviews architecturally significant changes, supports infrastructure provisioning, and evaluates emerging tools and features to meet evolving domain needs.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field.
• 10 or more years of experience in data architecture, data modeling, and data management.
• Demonstrated experience leading senior architects and engineers across multiple concurrent domains or workstreams.
• Expert proficiency in dimensional data modeling, including star and snowflake schemas and fact/dimension design, and dbt-style layered architecture.
• Ability to map complex business processes to data structures.
• Experience with data modeling and diagramming tools.
• Deep hands-on experience with Snowflake or another cloud data warehouse, including architecture, performance tuning, security, multi-account or federated patterns, and data sharing.
• Experience with dbt or similar SQL-based data transformation tools, including project structure, macros, testing, and documentation.
• Solid understanding of Airflow DAG design patterns and dependencies, including Airflow on Kubernetes/GKE.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform for provisioning Snowflake and cloud resources, GitHub-based CI/CD, and secret management tools such as HashiCorp Vault.
• Understanding of BI tools and how they ingest and query data, with ability to design models for fast, interactive dashboards.
• Familiarity with managed replication tools such as HVR, Fivetran, or Qlik Replicate and the architectural implications of CDC versus snapshot patterns.
• Strong knowledge of data warehousing and data lakes, including technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, GCP BigQuery, and open table formats such as Iceberg or Delta Lake.
• Experience architecting on at least one major cloud platform; GCP is preferred, while AWS or Azure is acceptable.
• Knowledge of relational, dimensional, and NoSQL modeling methodologies.
• Strong understanding of ETL, ELT, and API integration patterns.
• Strong SQL skills and experience modeling both transactional source systems and analytical cloud data warehouses.
• Familiarity with data governance principles, data quality management tools, and practices.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts in business language and translate business needs into technical concepts.
• Proven ability to set technical direction, coach individual contributors, and raise engineering standards.

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing data solutions across multiple enterprise business domains, such as Finance, Supply Chain, R&D, Sustainability, or Master Data.
• Experience leading distributed data teams.
• Experience in Retail or CPG domains.
• Certifications such as Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP), SnowPro Advanced Architect, dbt Analytics Engineer, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, or GCP Professional Data Engineer.
• Excellent communication, presentation, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow architects and engineers responsible for Finance, Supply Chain, Global Technology (R&D), Sustainability, and Master Data domains.
• Set architectural direction, uphold engineering standards, and develop a cohesive data organization.
• Translate business goals across owned domains into a forward-looking data architecture roadmap.
• Own the design and lifecycle of conceptual, logical, and physical data models, ensuring business rules are accurately codified, versioned, and optimized for analytics.
• Define and manage data products that are documented, reliable, standardized, and interoperable across domains.
• Operationalize enterprise standards and governance, including data quality checks, privacy controls, metadata and lineage management, and security policies.
• Serve as design authority and optimize pipeline performance, Snowflake resource consumption, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
• Apply Snowflake best practices, including clustering and micro-partitions, when designing data models.
• Adopt and operationalize enterprise dbt project structure, modeling conventions, and testing frameworks; propose domain-specific extensions through the central review process when needed.
• Partner with Data Delivery Leads to maintain architectural integrity during sprint execution and with the Central Data Platform Team to request and configure infrastructure resources.
• Approve architecturally significant pull requests involving new sources, dbt project structures, model contracts, and cross-domain dependencies.
• Implement granular security policies, including row-level security and dynamic masking, and ensure data assets have clear catalog entries, lineage, and metadata.
• Regularly review high-cost queries and pipelines, redesign inefficient flows, reduce Snowflake credit consumption, and improve report performance.
• Evaluate features and tools, such as Iceberg tables, for their suitability to domain needs.
• Collaborate with senior business stakeholders, delivery leads, data engineers, data scientists, and enterprise architects to develop data models and integration strategies.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Basic life insurance
• Paid parental leave
• Disability coverage
• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching contributions, subject to eligibility requirements
• Minimum of 15 vacation/PTO days for salaried employees
• 13 paid holidays
• Paid sick leave according to role, location, and applicable local laws
• Potential eligibility for discretionary bonuses, profit-sharing, and long-term incentives for executive-level roles

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director