Senior Data Architect

First Citizens Bank•Raleigh, NC

15h

About The Position

The Senior Data Architect is a senior technical leader within Enterprise Data & Analytics (ED&A) responsible for defining, designing, and implementing enterprise-scale data architectures that enable trusted, governed, and business-ready data across the organization. This role requires deep hands-on expertise across transactional systems (OLTP), analytical platforms (OLAP), modern cloud data platforms, data integration, and enterprise data modeling. The Senior Data Architect is expected to operate from strategy through implementation, partnering with engineering teams to design scalable solutions while actively participating in architecture reviews, complex data modeling, performance optimization, data product design, and platform modernization initiatives. The ideal candidate brings extensive experience designing and implementing modern data ecosystems leveraging AWS, Snowflake, Data Vault 2.0, DBT, API-based integration patterns, event-driven architectures, metadata management, and AI-ready data foundations.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree and 6 years of experience in Enterprise data architecture, advanced data solutions, cloud platforms OR High School Diploma or GED and 10 years of experience in Enterprise data architecture, advanced data solutions, cloud platforms
12+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Data Architecture, Information Management, or Analytics Engineering.
5+ years serving as a lead architect for enterprise-scale data platforms.
Proven experience designing and implementing modern cloud data platforms.
Demonstrated experience leading large-scale data modernization programs.
Experience working directly with engineering teams on implementation, optimization, and troubleshooting.
Snowflake
AWS Data Services
Amazon S3
Data Lake and Lakehouse architectures
Cloud-native data ecosystems
ELT/ETL architectures
Data integration patterns
Change Data Capture (CDC)
Event-driven architectures
API-based integration
Data orchestration frameworks
Snowflake
DBT
Qlik Replicate
Astronomer / Apache Airflow
AWS
Data Vault 2.0
Collibra
BigID
Conceptual, Logical and Physical Data Modeling
Data Vault 2.0
Dimensional Modeling
Canonical Modeling
Master Data Management
Reference Data Management
Data Governance
Data Quality
Data Lineage
Metadata Management
Data Cataloging
Data Contracts

Nice To Haves

Financial Services or Banking industry experience.
Experience modernizing legacy data warehouse environments.
Experience architecting large-scale Customer 360 solutions.
Experience supporting regulatory and risk reporting ecosystems.
Knowledge of Data Mesh and Data Product operating models.
TOGAF, CDMP, SnowPro, AWS, or equivalent certifications.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve enterprise data architecture standards, patterns, and reference architectures.
Develop target-state architectures supporting ED&A strategic objectives and Nexus platform evolution.
Lead architecture design across operational, analytical, reporting, regulatory, and AI use cases.
Drive consistency across data acquisition, storage, transformation, governance, and consumption layers.
Establish architecture guardrails balancing agility, scalability, maintainability, and regulatory compliance.
Serve as a senior technical architect responsible for end-to-end design of the Nexus ecosystem including: Data Ingestion Layer, Data Storage & Processing Layers, Transformation & Orchestration, Operational Analytics.
Provide deep expertise across multiple modeling disciplines: OLTP Modeling, Analytical Modeling (OLAP), Data Vault 2.0, Information Architecture.
Architects in this role are expected to actively review and contribute to data models rather than simply approve designs.
Drive adoption of data product thinking across ED&A.
Define standards for ownership, accountability, quality, discoverability, and reuse.
Partner with business domains to establish trusted and reusable analytical assets.
Design scalable domain-oriented architectures supporting Data Mesh principles where appropriate.
Enable self-service consumption through governed data products.
Partner closely with Governance teams to embed controls directly within architectural designs.
Responsibilities include: Metadata architecture, Business glossary alignment, Technical and business lineage, Data quality architecture, Data contract implementation, Sensitive data classification, Policy-based access control, Data retention and auditability.
Leverage Collibra, BigID, and platform-native capabilities to improve trust and transparency across enterprise data assets.
Actively troubleshoot and improve platform performance by: Reviewing Snowflake query performance, Optimizing warehouse utilization and workload management, Designing scalable partitioning and clustering strategies, Improving ELT processing efficiency, Reducing data movement and duplication, Enhancing pipeline scalability and resiliency, Ensuring efficient storage and compute utilization.
Expected to participate in technical deep-dives and solution reviews with engineering teams.
Define architectural foundations for enterprise AI initiatives.
Design AI-ready data products and curated consumption layers.
Support feature engineering and model-serving architectures.
Enable trusted, explainable, and governed AI data pipelines.
Partner with Data Science teams to ensure scalability of predictive and generative AI solutions.
Architect retrieval, metadata, and knowledge-layer capabilities supporting future GenAI initiatives.
Lead architecture reviews across strategic initiatives and programs.
Influence technical direction across engineering, analytics, governance, and business teams.
Mentor engineers, architects, and modelers on modern architecture principles.
Establish engineering standards, design patterns, and reusable frameworks.
Provide thought leadership on emerging technologies and industry best practices.
Serve as the escalation point for complex architecture and modeling challenges.