Technical Architect - Data Infrastructure

USAA•San Antonio, TX

1d•$143,320 - $273,930•Hybrid

About The Position

The Technical Architect, Data Infrastructure will set enterprise technology strategy and direction for USAA’s Data in Motion domain, governing how data moves across the association. This architect will establish standards and solutions across data streaming, distributed systems, messaging platforms, integrations, and enterprise data pipelines while ensuring architectures are secure, scalable, and resilient. The role will help advance USAA from traditional ETL and legacy integration platforms toward modern ELT, streaming, and pipeline-based approaches. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in Snowflake integrations, modern ELT technologies, streaming platforms, and data lake technologies, combined with the ability to influence enterprise decisions and drive adoption across multiple teams. We offer a flexible work environment that requires an individual to be in the office 4 days per week. This position can be based in one of the following locations: San Antonio, TX, Plano, TX, or Phoenix, AZ. Relocation assistance is not available for this position.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree, or 4 additional years of relevant education and/or experience in place of a degree.
8 years of experience in data movement technologies, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership role within IT.
Experience with technology application development and/or infrastructure and operational implementation.
Demonstrated ability to explain complex technology decisions to technical and nontechnical audiences at all organizational levels.
Demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships with stakeholders, frontline management, and second-level management.
Understanding and application of technical architecture standards, principles, and policies.
Knowledge of applicable regulations and technology risk-management practices.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading an enterprise-scale modernization from legacy ETL and integration platforms to a modern Snowflake-centered architecture using ELT, event streaming, and open data lake technologies such as Apache Iceberg.

Responsibilities

Collaborates with business and IT stakeholders to understand strategy, requirements, measures, risks and controls for a business function or IT domain.
Utilizes expertise and research to create technology decisions with relevant architecture artifacts and proactively apply architecture thinking to conceive evolutionary strategies and roadmaps that can accelerate current capabilities for a business function or technology domain.
Cultivates productive and trusted relationships with business and IT stakeholders, as well as engineering resources, to provide leadership and guidance to influence and shape priority, cost transparency and execution of architecture solutions and domain direction.
Assess domain applications in collaboration with business and application owners to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and risks. Advise business owners of proposed courses of action.
Defines and documents architecture standards for a technology domain to ensure architectural compliance of technology solutions. Use risk assessment methodologies to draft/evaluate and approve/reject waivers to architecture standards.
Participates in activities that support the USAA technology ecosystem such as workstream planning, solution design reviews, code reviews, test case definition, and assistance in troubleshooting of Availability Command Center incidents to resolve complex production issues related to a technology domain.
Provides professional and technical mentorship for new architects, engineers and IT community colleagues in an open, respectful, flexible and empathetic manner. Seeks out mentoring opportunities specifically to create team redundancy and backfill ability.
Executes architecture practices and processes by properly creating and maintaining architecture domain documentation, ensuring timely completion of deliverables and suggesting enhancements.
Establishes external relationships with contacts on industry organizations and government boards and vendors in the marketplace related to a business function or technology domain.
Establishes a plan to gain external eminence by pursuing professional and industry technical certifications, presenting at conferences, publishing technical papers, contributing to open source, authoring patents, etc.
Ensures risks associated with business activities are effectively identified, measured, monitored, and controlled in accordance with risk and compliance policies and procedures.