Senior Data Platform Architect

Viking Cruises US • Los Angeles, CA

3d • $220,000 - $250,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Data Platform Architect will design, administer, and secure the Azure Databricks platform supporting digital and marketing, finance, revenue management, and booking and reservations. The role leads North American platform administration, including Unity Catalog governance, access management, pipeline reliability, and cost management. It also establishes standards for safe, AI-assisted coding across the data team.

This is a hybrid position based in Viking’s Woodland Hills, Los Angeles office. Employees are required to work in the office Monday and Thursday, plus one additional weekday each week, in accordance with the hybrid work policy.

The architect designs the platform’s medallion architecture and aligns it with enterprise security and networking standards. The role administers Databricks and Unity Catalog, manages identities and credentials, and designs ingestion and orchestration across Azure Data Factory and Databricks Workflows. It also defines security, access, governance, reliability, quality, and cost practices; partners with Infrastructure on Terraform and CI/CD; and leads platform incident response. The position sets AI-assisted engineering standards and maintains the associated coding harness and review practices.

Requirements

• Strong end-to-end data platform experience across architecture, administration, and production operations.
• Expert hands-on Databricks design and administration experience, including Unity Catalog, cluster policy, workspace configuration, and identity federation beyond notebook development.
• Expert SQL skills, including complex analytical queries, optimization, and performance tuning.
• Advanced Python skills, including production-grade PySpark and strong data quality and testing practices.
• Strong Azure skills, including ADLS Gen2, Data Factory, Entra ID, Key Vault, private connectivity, and RBAC design.
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, and Git-based CI/CD.
• Proven ownership of a production platform.
• Experience with data governance and access control, including privacy or consent handling across multiple markets.
• Ability to explain design trade-offs to engineers and business stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Experience operating Snowflake, Synapse, or Microsoft Fabric alongside Databricks.
• MLOps experience with Databricks Asset Bundles, plus drift and quality monitoring over inference tables.
• Experience retiring a legacy SQL Server estate without breaking downstream reports.
• Experience with dbt or a similar framework for layered models and testing.
• Databricks or Azure certification, such as Data Engineer Professional or Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
• Prior platform owner or technical lead experience.

Responsibilities

• Design medallion architecture, including catalog and schema design, layer contracts, and the promotion path.
• Align platform design with enterprise security and networking standards.
• Coordinate Data Solutions and Infrastructure so BI, AI, data science, and activation teams can build on platform decisions.
• Administer Unity Catalog, including catalogs, external locations, credentials, grants, and service principals.
• Set workspace and compute standards.
• Manage identity, including users, groups, SCIM provisioning from Entra ID, secret scopes, and token governance.
• Design pipelines across Azure Data Factory and Databricks Workflows.
• Maintain source integrations and their credential lifecycles.
• Establish data contracts with upstream owners.
• Make a SQL Server-to-Databricks modernization decision while preserving existing reporting.
• Set and enforce the AI coding standard and build and maintain the AI coding harness.
• Establish review practices for generated code and SQL, including correctness, cost, and performance impact.
• Define security posture, including network isolation, private connectivity, and storage firewalls.
• Manage credential hygiene, including keeping secrets in Key Vault, scheduled rotation, and avoiding long-lived plaintext tokens.
• Design the access model, including roles and privileged access.
• Partner with Infrastructure to manage configuration in Terraform and CI/CD.
• Define SLAs for critical pipelines and build monitoring and alerting to demonstrate whether they are met.
• Lead incident response through triage, root cause analysis, remediation, and a written RCA that drives change.
• Monitor platform spending, including cluster right-sizing, storage lifecycle, and cost per workload.

Benefits

• Annual discretionary bonus eligibility.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP) for Viking full-time regular employees working in the United States.
• Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance at a highly subsidized rate; some plans are fully paid by Viking.
• Accrual of 15 paid vacation days, sick time accrual by state, and 6 paid holidays per year.
• Opportunity to take a free and/or discounted cruise.
• Highly subsidized gym membership.
• Discounts on theatres, theme parks, movie tickets, and travel through IATA membership, among other discounts.
• Highly competitive compensation plan; stated salary range is $220,000-$250,000 annually.

What This Job Offers

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