Role Overview
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Data Architect to lead the design, evolution, and governance of a cloud-native data warehouse on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This role owns the overall data architecture vision and ensures the data platform is scalable, secure, cost-efficient, and analytics-ready.
You will provide architectural leadership across data engineering and analytics teams, define standards and best practices, and partner with senior stakeholders to enable high-impact data use cases.
Key Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the end-to-end cloud data architecture on GCP, with BigQuery as the core analytical platform
- Define and enforce enterprise data modeling standards using dbt (dimensional, semantic, and analytics-layer models)
- Architect and govern ELT pipelines orchestrated by Airflow and/or Dagster, ensuring reliability and scalability
- Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance to data engineers and analytics engineers
- Review and approve data designs, dbt models, and pipeline implementations for architectural consistency
- Drive BigQuery performance optimization and cost governance, including partitioning, clustering, and workload management
- Establish and mature data quality, testing, observability, and lineage frameworks
- Define and enforce security, access control, and data governance standards across the data platform
- Partner with product, analytics, and business leaders to translate complex requirements into scalable data solutions
- Lead architectural decision-making for new data sources, tools, and platform enhancements
- Balance business requirements and data platform cost expense, optimize the costs based on target
- 5+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or analytics engineering roles
- Proven experience leading the design and implementation of cloud data warehouses
- Deep hands-on experience with GCP, especially BigQuery
- Strong expertise in dbt for data modeling, testing, documentation, and deployments
- Extensive experience with Airflow and/or Dagster for workflow orchestration
- Advanced SQL skills and strong command of data modeling patterns
- Experience designing scalable, reliable ELT architectures in production environments
- Ability to lead architecture discussions and influence technical direction across teams
- Experience with large-scale or multi-domain data platforms
- Knowledge of additional GCP services such as Cloud Storage, Dataproc, and IAM
- Experience enabling BI and semantic layers (e.g. PowerBI, dbt metrics, Cube)
- Familiarity with data governance, metadata management, and data catalog tools
- Experience in regulated industries or environments with strict data controls
- Experience balancing platform scalability with cost efficiency