PRINCIPAL INFORMATION ARCHITECT(W2 Requirement)

Note:: Healthcare payer experience is must. This one is contract to hire requirement and looking for candidates within EST and CST.

The Principal Information Architect provides enterprise-level leadership for information and data architecture across healthcare payer business domains. This role defines the strategies, standards, models, and architectural patterns needed to ensure enterprise information is trusted, secure, interoperable, reusable, and aligned with business objectives.

The role translates business and technical requirements into architecture blueprints spanning applications, integrations, data platforms, analytics, and business processes. As a principal-level individual contributor, this position leads through technical expertise, influence, architecture governance, and cross-functional collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain enterprise information and data architecture strategies, principles, standards, reference architectures, and roadmaps.
• Translate business and technical requirements into scalable architecture blueprints aligned with healthcare payer capabilities and strategic objectives.
• Develop current-state, transition-state, and target-state information architectures.
• Define conceptual and logical information models, common business definitions, information domains, canonical models, and authoritative data sources.
• Establish patterns for master and reference data, metadata, lineage, data quality, information lifecycle, and systems of record.
• Partner with data governance, business owners, and data stewards to establish information ownership, accountability, and standards.
• Define integration and interoperability patterns supporting APIs, events, messaging, ETL/ELT, batch, streaming, FHIR, HL7, and X12/EDI.
• Provide architectural direction for data warehouses, data lakes/lakehouses, analytical platforms, and distributed data environments.
• Guide the appropriate use of Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, SQL, NoSQL, ETL/ELT, and master data management platforms.
• Partner with analytics and business intelligence teams to promote consistent definitions, governed metrics, semantic models, and trusted reporting.
• Ensure information architecture incorporates security, privacy, regulatory, data-quality, and lifecycle requirements.
• Participate in architecture governance and evaluate solutions for alignment with enterprise standards and target-state direction.
• Document architecture decisions, alternatives, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs.
• Facilitate architecture reviews and cross-domain design discussions involving business, product, engineering, analytics, security, and architecture teams.
• Communicate the business impact of architecture decisions and mentor architects, engineers, analysts, and data practitioners.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in a related field
• Proven experience as a Data Architect, Information Architect, Data Scientist, Data Analyst, or similar data or architecture role.
• Demonstrated knowledge of healthcare payer business processes and information domains.
• Experience translating business and technical requirements into enterprise architecture blueprints and solution designs.
• Experience with data warehouses, data lakes, ETL/ELT, SQL, NoSQL, Oracle, master data management, data mining, segmentation, and distributed systems.
• Understanding of conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling.
• Understanding of data lifecycle management, metadata, lineage, data quality, data governance, and information security.
• Familiarity with business intelligence and visualization technologies such as Power BI.
• Ability to articulate the business impact of architecture decisions and translate technical outcomes into measurable business value.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and lead cross-functional stakeholders across business and technology domains.
• Strong written, verbal, presentation, facilitation, organizational, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a complex, matrixed environment.
• Understanding of product management, agile principles, architecture governance, and modern development methodologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with the Microsoft Azure data and analytics ecosystem, including Azure SQL, and experience with Snowflake.
• Healthcare payer or health insurance architecture experience.
• Experience with predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, or AI.
• Experience with Kimball, Inmon, Data Vault, dimensional modeling, or comparable methodologies.
• Experience with real-time, event-driven, streaming, and large-batch data pipelines.
• Knowledge of FHIR, HL7, X12/EDI, and healthcare interoperability standards.
• Experience with enterprise metadata, data catalogs, lineage, semantic layers, or data governance technologies.