Data Architect

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What the market looks like

Data architecture has re-emerged as a critical specialty now that most enterprises are building shared feature stores, vector infrastructure, and AI-ready data platforms. The majority of the senior architect postings we see come from technology companies, consulting firms, and financial services. Base compensation for senior data architects generally lands in a $145K–$240K range, and the strongest architects we place are the ones preparing enterprises for AI at scale — not just maintaining yesterday's warehouse.

Job responsibilities

• Own the enterprise data architecture — warehouse, lakehouse, streaming, and increasingly AI and vector layers

• Set standards and reference patterns for teams building on top of the data platform

• Partner with engineering and business leadership on architecture trade-offs and investment

• Guide build-versus-buy decisions across data infrastructure and AI-ready tooling

• Review designs across data engineering, ML engineering, and analytics teams

• Drive evolution toward an AI-ready data foundation — feature stores, vector stores, and semantic layers

• Lead cross-team architecture working groups

• Mentor senior data engineers and architects across the organization

Candidate requirements

• 8+ years of data engineering, architecture, or senior technical leadership experience

• Deep expertise across warehouse, lakehouse, and streaming patterns

• Hands-on experience with modern stacks — Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Kafka, and dbt

• Strong fluency with at least one major cloud's data stack (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

• Experience designing for AI and ML workloads at scale

• Excellent stakeholder and technical communication