Sr. Data Architect - Digital Director

CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen)•Indianapolis, IN

About The Position

CLA is a top 10 national professional services firm where our purpose is to create opportunities every day, for our clients, our people, and our communities through industry-focused wealth advisory, digital, audit, tax, consulting, and outsourcing services. Even with more than 8,500 people, 130 U.S. locations, and a global reach, we promise to know you and help you. CliftonLarsonAllen, LLP (CLA) is seeking an experienced and dynamic Sr. Data Architect – Digital Director. The Data Architect leads the design and implementation of modern data platforms that enable digital transformation for clients. This role partners with business and technology stakeholders to define data architectures, governance models, and scalable analytics foundations. The Data Architect brings deep expertise in cloud-native data platforms, guides architectural decisions, and contributes to client strategy, delivery excellence, and practice growth.

Requirements

7+ years of relevant experience in data architecture, data engineering, or analytics platform design.
Bachelor’s degree required; relevant experience may be considered in lieu of degree.
Microsoft Fabric (OneLake, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold), Real-Time Analytics)
Microsoft Azure (Foundry, Copilot Studio, Azure Data Factory, Synapse, Azure SQL, Event Hubs, Functions)
Microsoft Purview (data catalog, lineage, governance)
Databricks (Lakehouse architecture, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog)
Additional Platforms: Snowflake, AWS (S3, Glue, Redshift), Google Cloud (BigQuery), Kafka, dbt
Programming & Query Languages: SQL, Python, Scala
Architecture Concepts: Data modeling, semantic layers, streaming architectures, API integration, CI/CD, infrastructure as code
Experience preparing analytics environments for AI/ML workloads
Ability to enable secure data sharing and third-party

Nice To Haves

10 Years of experience preferred.
Preferred fields: Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, or related disciplines.

Responsibilities

Data Architecture & Strategy: Design enterprise and solution-level data architectures aligned to client business goals. Define target-state architectures, migration roadmaps, and reference architectures across analytics, AI/ML, and operational intelligence use cases.
Platform Engineering & Enablement: Architect, implement, and optimize cloud data platforms using Microsoft Fabric, Azure, Databricks, and related services. Guide ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and semantic modeling patterns.
Data Governance & Management: Define and implement governance frameworks including metadata management, lineage, data quality, security, and privacy using tools such as Microsoft Purview. Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure regulatory alignment.
Analytics & AI Enablement: Enable advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI workloads through well-architected lakehouse, warehouse, and real-time data solutions.
Leadership & Mentorship: Provide architectural leadership across project teams. Mentor engineers and analysts on best practices, patterns, and emerging technologies.
Client Advisory & Business Development: Serve as a trusted advisor to clients, supporting solution envisioning, proposals, and thought leadership. Contribute to practice development and go-to-market initiatives.