Principal Architect & Data Engineer

Role Description

We are seeking a Principal Architect & Data Engineer to serve as the technical visionary and master builder for our next-generation data ecosystem. You will lead the strategy and execution required to unify our current data silos into a high-performance, Federated Enterprise Data Intelligence platform.

In this role, you will balance the "heavy lifting" of massive-scale engineering with the "high-level" strategy of agentic AI and executive-level roadmapping. You will be responsible for creating an environment that provides business units with autonomous "sub-lake" capabilities while maintaining a single, governed enterprise source of truth.

Key Responsibilities

• Unified Architecture & Engineering
  • Data Lakehouse Evolution: Architect the consolidation of disparate storage and compute environments into a unified, high-performance Lakehouse architecture (supporting Iceberg/Delta Lake).
  • Agentic Frameworks: Scale and refine our internal agentic platform and registry, ensuring it is robust, model-agnostic, and enterprise-ready.
  • Federation & Governance: Design a "Data Mesh" that enables business units to innovate independently within pre-defined guardrails and "Data Zones."
  • Data Trust & Observability: Define the standards, contracts, and observability metrics that make structured and unstructured data trustworthy, discoverable, and easy to consume in both batch and near-real-time contexts.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship
  • Engineering Excellence: Set the global standard for high-performance query analytics, data modeling, and "Zero-Copy" architecture patterns.
  • Coach & Develop: Serve as a formal mentor to intermediate and senior data architects and engineers, fostering a culture of technical rigor, automation, and continuous professional development.
  • Lead by Influence: Guide technical delivery across federated teams, ensuring decentralized projects align with centralized enterprise architectural standards.
  • Technical Direction: Serve as the lead technical resource on the team, heavily influencing decisions regarding tools, implementation, design, and workflows.
• Executive Communication & Business Alignment
  • Sr. Leadership Advisory: Present complex architectural roadmaps, ROI projections, and security risk assessments clearly to the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and the Board.
  • Strategic Mapping: Partner with business leaders to ensure that every data product and ML model directly maps to corporate KPIs, such as Revenue Growth and Operational Efficiency.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience in large-scale data engineering, architecture, and data platform roles, including 1+ years at a Staff or Principal level.
• Mastery of Python, SQL, and Spark.
• Proven experience with workflow orchestration (e.g., Airflow), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), and robust CI/CD testing pipelines.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in AWS (S3, Glue, Redshift, Bedrock) OR Google Cloud (BigQuery, Vertex AI).
• Expert knowledge of federated query engines, semantic layers, and modern "Zero-Copy" data sharing.
• Extensive experience operating production data platforms in batch and near-real-time environments with strong lineage, catalogs, and access controls serving as systems of record.
• Proven track record building enterprise data governance, contracts, and quality frameworks for both structured and unstructured data (including metadata standards, classification, and PII detection/redaction).
• Ability to define safe-access patterns for AI consumption to prevent sensitive data exposure.
• Experience enforcing security baselines (encryption, RBAC/ABAC, masking/tokenization) and policy-as-code.
• Experience establishing comprehensive frameworks for transparent cost attribution, optimized storage tiering, and advanced metadata tagging.
• Proven experience architecting RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) patterns, vector readiness concepts (schemas, metadata, provenance), and managing enterprise AI registries.
• Experience defining business logic centrally (via semantic modeling) to seamlessly serve both human BI users and programmatic AI agents.
• A documented track record of developing junior and senior talent into high-performing architects.
• Exceptional ability to simplify complex technical hurdles into strategic business decisions for non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to successfully navigate the needs of autonomous business units while firmly upholding central IT's security and quality mandates.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering and/or architecture.
• 5+ years AWS Redshift ecosystem.
• 1+ years of experience at a staff or principal level.

Benefits

• Target Base Salary Range: $160,000 CAD - $170,000 CAD.
• Consistent with Motorola Solutions values and applicable law, we provide the following information to promote pay transparency and equity.