Senior Data Platform Architect

Viking Cruises•Los Angeles, CA

45d•$155,000 - $180,000

About The Position

Viking is seeking a Senior Data Platform Architect to design, operate, and secure the Azure Databricks platform supporting finance, revenue management, marketing, booking, and reservations. The role combines end-to-end platform architecture with North American platform administration, including Unity Catalog governance, identity and credential management, pipeline reliability, and cost control. The architect will document and automate platform operations and set standards and tooling for safe AI-assisted coding across the data team. The position spans Databricks and Unity Catalog administration, ingestion and orchestration across Azure Data Factory and Databricks Workflows, AI/ML platform governance, security and access management, identity resolution and marketing activation, and reliability, quality, and cost management. It also works across Data Solutions and Infrastructure to establish architectures and controls that support BI, AI, data science, and activation teams. The role reports to the Director, Customer Data and Identity Engineering.

Requirements

Strong end-to-end data platform experience across architecture, administration, and production operations.
Expert hands-on Databricks platform design and administration, including Unity Catalog metastores, external locations, storage credentials, grants, cluster policy, workspace configuration, and identity federation.
Strong working knowledge of ML platform administration, including Unity Catalog models, MLflow, Mosaic AI Model Serving, and GPU cluster policy and Azure quota management.
Expert SQL skills, including designing, optimizing, and troubleshooting complex analytical queries; deep knowledge of joins, CTEs, window functions, aggregations, and performance tuning.
Advanced Python skills for production-grade data transformation and automation with PySpark, including data quality, testing, and scalable Databricks processing.
Strong working knowledge of Azure platform services, including ADLS Gen2, Data Factory, Entra ID, Key Vault, virtual networks, private connectivity, and RBAC design.
Working knowledge of Terraform in practice and Git-based CI/CD, with an intolerance for undeclared manual changes.
Demonstrated ownership of a production platform, including taking responsibility for failures and fixing underlying classes of problems.
Practical data governance and access-control experience, including privacy or consent handling across more than one market.
Experience working with financial or accounting data and its reconciliation requirements.
Ability to communicate design decisions and trade-offs clearly to engineers and business stakeholders and explain objections to unsuitable designs.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on Adobe Experience Platform or a comparable CDP or identity-resolution stack, such as LiveRamp, Snowflake, or Salesforce CDP.
Experience operating Snowflake, Synapse, or Microsoft Fabric alongside Databricks.
MLOps delivery experience with Databricks Asset Bundles or an equivalent, and drift and quality monitoring over inference tables.
D365 or another ERP and finance integration experience under real accounting scrutiny.
Experience retiring a legacy SQL Server estate without breaking dependent reports.
Experience with dbt or another framework for layered models, testing, and documentation.
Experience with booking curves, demand patterns, or revenue analytics in hospitality, cruise, travel, or another high-volume consumer booking domain.
Databricks or Azure certification, such as Data Engineer Professional or Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
Prior experience as a platform owner or technical lead.

Responsibilities

Design and implement medallion architecture, including catalog and schema design, layer contracts, and promotion from development through QA to production.
Design scalable data platform architectures aligned with enterprise security and networking standards.
Bridge Data Solutions and Infrastructure and make platform decisions that support BI, AI, data science, and activation teams.
Administer Unity Catalog, including catalog bindings, external locations, storage credentials, grants, and service-principal models.
Define workspace and compute standards, including cluster policies, runtime versions, pool lifecycle, job versus all-purpose compute, and serverless compute.
Manage platform identity, including users, groups, SCIM provisioning from Entra ID, secret scopes, and token governance.
Maintain the platform estate through runtime upgrades, deprecation tracking, and retirement of nonworking pools and jobs.
Design pipeline architecture across Azure Data Factory and Databricks Workflows, including dependencies, idempotency, watermarking, retries, and backfills.
Maintain source integrations, including Dataverse and Synapse Link exports, finance and booking systems, and third-party feeds, along with their runtimes, connectors, and credentials.
Establish data contracts with upstream owners so schema changes are known before reaching production.
Decide and deliver a SQL Server-to-Databricks modernization path without breaking dependent reporting.
Set and enforce AI coding standards, including assistant usage boundaries, human review requirements, and testing requirements for production code.
Build and maintain the AI coding harness, including repository instruction files, project context, MCP servers, tool permissions, and sandboxed environments.
Establish review practices for AI-generated code and SQL, checking data-model correctness, performance and cost, and recording provenance in pull requests.
Evaluate and improve AI coding output quality by refining instructions and context based on recurring team errors.
Administer Unity Catalog ML assets, including registered models, aliases, feature tables, MLflow experiments, grants, and promotion paths.
Define GPU and ML compute standards, including node-type allowlists, Azure quota management, idle termination, spot strategy, and ML Runtime lifecycle.
Govern foundation-model and external LLM access through the AI Gateway, including rate limits, usage tracking, payload logging, guardrails, and provider credentials.
Extend network and data-protection controls to AI workloads, including external-model egress rules, prompt and response retention, and customer-data handling in inference payloads.
Define the platform security posture, including network isolation, private connectivity, storage firewalls, and documented rationales for public-access exceptions.
Manage credential hygiene, including storing secrets in Key Vault, scheduled rotation, and preventing long-lived plaintext tokens in notebooks, pipelines, and configuration.
Design and administer access controls, role definitions, joiner/mover/leaver processes, privileged access, and periodic entitlement reviews.
Work with Infrastructure to manage platform configuration through Terraform and CI/CD and prevent drift between deployed and declared configuration.
Contribute to consent, suppression, and preference management, ensuring rules are correctly and provably applied per market and failures are detected by the platform.
Steward data-sharing connections into Adobe Experience Platform and activation.
Define SLAs for business-critical pipelines and build monitoring and alerting to measure performance against them.
Lead response to platform failures through triage, root-cause analysis, remediation, and written RCAs that drive changes.
Prevent silent partial loads, duplicate or missing records, and jobs reporting success on incomplete data.
Support the data quality framework, including rule coverage and severity semantics, and ensure blocking rules block.
Monitor platform spending through cluster right-sizing, storage lifecycle management, and cost visibility by workload.

Benefits

Highly competitive compensation plan.
Annual discretionary bonus eligibility.
401(k) plan with company match.
Employee Share Purchase Plan for eligible full-time regular U.S. employees.
Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance at a highly subsidized rate; some plans are fully paid by Viking.
15 accrued 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.
Great Place to Work certification.