Senior Data Architect

Why AIS?

When you join AIS, you're joining a mission-driven team that's passionate about making a difference. You'll work on projects that matter, alongside industry-leading experts, in an environment that fosters innovation, driving client success, and empowering our team to make a lasting impact. As an employee-owned company, we value collaboration, inclusivity, continuous growth, and shared success.

• Employee Ownership : Your contributions directly impact the company's success, and you share in its achievements.
• Continuous Learning : Access to resources, training, and mentorship to support your professional growth.
• Inclusive Culture : A workplace where diversity is celebrated, and everyone's voice is valued.
• Mission-Driven Work : Engage in projects that make a meaningful difference for our clients and communities.

What are we looking for?

At AIS, we're looking for more than just skills - we're looking for driven individuals who are passionate about making a difference, eager to grow, and aligned with our core principles.

What you will be doing?

This position is contingent upon contract award. We are currently pursuing a proposal and are seeking qualified candidates to include in our submission and identify candidates for future hiring needs on the program once awarded.
At AIS, we are dedicated to providing our employees with diverse opportunities to grow their careers while supporting a variety of impactful projects. For this position, we are seeking a talented individual to join AIS as a DataOps Architect.

• Core Knowledge & Skills: Deep expertise in designing scalable and resilient data architectures, advanced data governance, and integration technologies (ETL/ELT, API management, message queues). Expert in analytics platforms and best practices.
• Work & Complexity: Makes critical architectural decisions, manages cross-departmental integration projects, oversees complex migrations, and works with vendors to integrate third-party solutions.
• Quality & Independence: Develops and promotes best practices for data architecture, continuously optimizes processes, and ensures systems are designed for organizational growth and security.
• Teamwork & Communication: Collaborates with architects and technical leaders, leads cross-functional teams, and engages stakeholders to align data operations with business goals.
• Consulting & Engagement: Provides consulting on architecture and design, advises on innovative technologies, and conducts risk assessments with mitigation strategies.

As your initial project assignment, you will support the unique needs of our client as a Senior Data Architect. Project Summary

The Senior Data Architect will provide technical leadership for the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Foundry modernization program, defining target-state architecture, enterprise data modeling standards, governance frameworks, and AI-assisted delivery approaches. This role will partner closely with business stakeholders and delivery teams to ensure scalable, trusted, and business-aligned data products across Snowflake, DBT, and modern data platforms.

The ideal candidate brings extensive experience leading enterprise data warehouse modernization initiatives, designing cloud-native data architectures, implementing governance frameworks, and delivering large-scale analytics solutions. This individual will establish architectural standards, mentor technical teams, and drive best practices across data engineering and analytics initiatives.

What You'll Be Doing

• Define and govern the overall EDW Foundry architecture, including Silver, Gold, and Platinum data layers.
• Lead enterprise dimensional modeling initiatives, including conformed dimensions, business data products, and bus matrix strategy.
• Establish and enforce enterprise standards for data governance, metadata management, data quality, validation, lineage, and data promotion processes.
• Provide architectural leadership for Snowflake, DBT, Airflow, metadata platforms, and modernization initiatives.
• Define AI-assisted development standards, engineering patterns, and delivery frameworks.
• Develop enterprise architecture roadmaps supporting data platform modernization and cloud transformation.
• Design conceptual, logical, and physical data models that support enterprise-wide reporting, analytics, and operational use cases.
• Collaborate with business and technical stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable, maintainable data solutions.
• Establish best practices for DataOps, DevOps, CI/CD, and automated deployment processes.
• Lead architecture reviews, technical design sessions, and modernization planning efforts.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend innovative solutions to improve platform performance and scalability.
• Provide technical oversight, mentorship, and architectural direction to data engineering teams.
• Support project planning, roadmap development, estimation activities, and executive-level stakeholder engagements.

Required For This Opportunity

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical discipline.
• 12+ years of experience in Data Architecture, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, or related fields.
• 7+ years of experience designing and leading enterprise-scale data architecture and modernization initiatives.
• Extensive experience designing and implementing enterprise data warehouse solutions.
• Deep expertise in dimensional modeling methodologies, including star schemas, conformed dimensions, and Kimball-based architectures.
• Experience defining enterprise governance frameworks, metadata standards, data lineage, and data quality strategies.
• Experience designing cloud-native data platforms and modern lakehouse architectures.
• Strong knowledge of Snowflake architecture, data modeling, performance optimization, and enterprise implementation practices.
• Experience with DBT and modern ELT development frameworks.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing data integration and transformation pipelines.
• Strong SQL development and optimization skills.
• Experience developing and maintaining architecture roadmaps and technical standards.
• Knowledge of Agile methodologies, SDLC processes, and large-scale technology delivery programs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and mentor engineers, architects, and analysts.
• Experience communicating technical concepts to executive and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to translate complex business requirements into scalable enterprise data solutions.

Nice to Have Skills

Candidates possessing experience in the following areas are strongly preferred:

• Snowflake platform administration and optimization.
• Airflow workflow orchestration.
• Data Mesh and Data Product architecture.
• Medallion Architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold).
• Microsoft Fabric.
• Azure Data Factory.
• Azure Synapse Analytics.
• Azure Databricks.
• Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS Gen2).
• Kafka and event streaming technologies.
• Change Data Capture (CDC) implementation patterns.
• Metadata management platforms including Collibra and Informatica Metadata Manager.
• AWS data services including Redshift and S3.
• AI-assisted software development tools and modern engineering frameworks.
• DataOps, DevOps, and CI/CD implementation.
• Python development for data engineering and analytics.
• Business Intelligence and reporting platforms such as Power BI, Tableau, and MicroStrategy.
• Experience supporting large-scale cloud migration and enterprise modernization initiatives.
• Experience leading Proof of Concept (POC) efforts and technology evaluations.
• Experience working within highly regulated, federal, financial services, gaming, or large enterprise environments.
• Professional certifications such as:
  
  • Microsoft Azure Data Engineer Associate
  • Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  • Snowflake Certification
  • AWS Cloud Practitioner or AWS Solutions Architect
  • PMP Certification
  • SAFe Certification
  • Certified Scrum Product Owner

Education Requirements

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, or related field.

Preferred:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Analytics, Engineering, or related technical discipline.

At AIS, we are committed to offering competitive and fair compensation that reflects the skills, experience, and contributions of each team member.The targeted base salary range for this role is $153,000-$231,000 per year. Please note that this range is provided as a guideline and the final offer will be based on several factors, including but not limited to, skillset and competencies, level of experience, education, certifications, and location.We value transparency in our hiring process and are happy to discuss how your unique qualifications align with our compensation structure during the interview process.
Applied Information Sciences does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other basis. Employment decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs.