Data Architect

Data Architect OpportunityLighthouse Technology Services is partnering with our client to fill their Data Architect position! This is a direct hire opportunity and can be remote with travel to Orlando, Florida. Eligibility for this role requires U.S. citizenship due to federal government contract requirements. No C2C or subcontracting arrangements will be considered.What You'll Be Doing:Design and maintain the enterprise data architecture, ensuring alignment with business objectives, operational needs, and overall IT strategy.Develop conceptual, logical, and physical data models to support enterprise applications, analytics platforms, and the organization's data warehouse or lakehouse environments.Architect and guide the implementation of scalable data pipelines, integration frameworks, data warehouses, and data lakehouse solutions.Establish and promote data architecture standards, best practices, and governance frameworks across the organization.Evaluate and recommend modern data technologies, cloud platforms, and data tools to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of the data ecosystem.Partner with application, cloud, infrastructure, and engineering teams to ensure cohesive system and data design across platforms.Collaborate with data governance and security teams to define standards for metadata management, lineage tracking, master data management (MDM), and data quality.Ensure enterprise data assets are accurate, consistent, secure, and accessible by implementing strong governance and data quality practices.Work closely with business leaders, analysts, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical data solutions.Provide architectural oversight during development, testing, and deployment, ensuring solutions align with the approved architecture.Optimize database and platform performance, scalability, and cost efficiency across cloud and on-prem environments.Conduct architecture reviews, audits, and refactoring initiatives to continuously improve the health and maturity of the organization's data ecosystem.What You'll Need to Have:Strong hands on programming skills as this role will be architecture and development.A strong development background: 5+ years of hands-on software development experience with progression into architecture or technical leadership roles.Data integration expertise: Deep understanding of data integration patterns, methodologies, and best practices for enterprise-scale data movement and transformation.Streaming & event-driven architecture: Strong experience with streaming platforms (Kafka preferred) and queue-based integration patterns, with ability to evaluate tradeoffs between synchronous vs. asynchronous approaches.Data lake architecture: Proven experience designing and implementing data pipelines that ingest data from diverse enterprise systems and third-party sources into modern data lake architectures.Technical leadership: Demonstrated ability to coach and mentor development teams on integration best practices, design patterns, and architectural decisions.Enterprise integration: Experience integrating with multiple enterprise systems, APIs, and data sources, understanding security, scalability, and reliability requirements.Architecture mindset: Ability to think strategically about system design, evaluate technical options, articulate tradeoffs, and guide teams toward optimal solutions.Communication skills: Strong ability to translate complex technical concepts for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.Strong expertise in SQL and NoSQL database technologies and modern data storage architectures.Hands-on experience designing solutions on cloud data platforms, preferably within the Azure ecosystem.Deep understanding of data modeling methodologies and experience using data modeling and diagramming tools.Experience designing and implementing ETL/ELT pipelines and data integration frameworks.Strong knowledge of data lake and data warehouse architectures, including modern lakehouse patterns.Familiarity with modern data and analytics platforms such as Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, Synapse, BigQuery, or Cosmos DB.Experience working with real-time data streaming technologies such as Kafka or Azure Event Hubs.Understanding of AI/ML data pipelines and feature store architectures that support advanced analytics and machine learning workloads.Solid knowledge of data governance, metadata management, lineage tracking, and data quality frameworks.Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams across engineering, analytics, and business functions.Preferred Certifications / Technical Background:Azure Data Engineer or Azure Data ArchitectC#.Net Development backgroundSalary Range: $160,000 - $180,000 / annually