Financial Reporting Data Architect

Location: Hybrid in Stamford, CT preferred (remote for all star with frequent travel) Openings: 1 Duration: 6-month contract to hire Interview Process: 1st round with HM, 2nd round panel Must-haves: • Proven experience in data architecture for financial reporting projects. • Strong comprehension of financial verbiage. Ex. What information is on a balance sheet? • Experience using Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Purview, Power Bi, Azure, and the ability to do rapid prototyping • Ability to reverse-engineer large Excel spreadsheets to extract business logic and translate into scalable solutions. • Knowledge of reference tables and data dictionaries, and ability to document and maintain them. • Experience collaborating with business product teams during transformation initiatives. • Familiarity with change management processes and UAT (User Acceptance Testing) collection. • Proficiency in DAX coding for Power BI, SQL, and building financial dashboards through them. • Demonstrated ability to create business test cases and validate reporting accuracy. • Experience using Azure DevOps (ADO) Boards for maintaining evidence of work. Plusses: • Experience working on a financial reporting data transformation project for an insurance or reinsurance company. Day-to-Day: Our client is seeking a Data Architect to lead a financial reporting transformation initiative. As it stands, the finance team's data spans throughout a large number of spreadsheets, all with numerous tabs. They want to ensure accurate and compliant financial reporting, so they are looking for an architect to assist in structuring and analyzing the data. This role involves working directly with the stakeholders in the finance department. The architect will be using rapid prototyping, translating what the stakeholders request and then executing. This candidate will have experience defining the possibilities of this semantic model for non-technical stakeholders and explaining key impacts of their requests (ex. speed reduction, vulnerabilities). The architect will reverse-engineer existing Excel-based reports, extract business rules, and translate them into automated data pipelines and Power BI dashboards using DAX and SQL. Responsibilities include defining and maintaining reference tables and data dictionaries, enforcing data governance policies through Microsoft Purview, and collaborating with business product teams to align technical solutions with finance requirements. The architect will manage change control processes, oversee UAT collection, and document evidence in ADO Boards to support Agile delivery, but can also be flexible in a hybrid Agile/Waterfall environment. Additional duties include creating business test cases, optimizing data models, and ensuring stakeholder engagement throughout the transformation lifecycle. They must have a forward mindset and the ability to include analytics on top of basic reporting as they continue to add data. This candidate must have worked on a project collaborating with the finance department in the past, to ensure they have a strong understanding of the terms and requirements of the team.