Lead Data Architect

Lead Data Architect (Top Priority) Location: San Francisco, CA (Candidates considered for this role will be located in the San Francisco, Bay Area. There will be an in-office requirement of 3x a week) Experience: 10+ years Visa Status: H4EAD, GC & USC C2H & FTE We are seeking a Lead Data Architect to join our Data Platform team. This role will be pivotal in modernizing our existing platform and building out a scalable data, reporting and AI architecture to provide scale, enhance product offerings, and meet new business requirements. Job Description. Modernize, optimize and evolve a cloud-native data stack into a scalable, secure and high performing ecosystem such as SQL & NoSQL repositories for diverse workloads Leverage modern data platform principles including lakehouse, data fabric and data mesh architectures to improve scalability, decentralization, governance, and interoperability. Design Scalable Architectures: Build flexible architectures to support analytics, real-time reporting, AI/ML Ops pipelines, feature stores, and graph-based data relationships. Unified Data Platform: Design high performing and cost effective solutions that handle both structured and unstructured data at high volume and high velocity. Establish Modeling Standards: Define enterprise-wide standards for data modeling, semantic layers, and golden datasets to enable consistency and reuse. Advance Governance & Quality: Implement frameworks for data lineage, quality, privacy, and security (GDPR, CCPA, PII protections). Enable Personalization & Insights: Architect data capabilities that fuel advanced recommendations, relationship mapping, and connected user experiences. Evaluate & Integrate Technologies: Guide adoption of best-fit technologies to support evolving use cases in data science, AI, and scalable analytics. Partner Cross-Functionally: Collaborate with engineering, product, analytics, and data science teams to translate business vision into technical solutions. Mentor & Lead: Provide architectural leadership, coaching engineers on best practices while influencing strategic platform decisions.. Required Skills: 10+ years of experience in data architecture, platform engineering, or data engineering, with at least 3+ in a senior or architect role. Proven expertise with modern cloud-native data stacks including Snowflake, Databricks, MDM, Data Catalogs and CDPs. Hands-on experience with Looker or other BI/semantic modeling tools. Strong understanding of graph-based data models, recommendation systems, and personalization architectures. Expertise in data modeling, metadata management, and semantic layers. Proficiency with streaming/event-driven data pipelines and real-time processing (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Spark Streaming, etc.). Familiarity with AI/ML pipelines, feature stores, and unstructured/structured data integration. Strong foundation in data governance, lineage, cataloging, and compliance frameworks. Excellent communication and leadership skills to align technical direction across diverse teams Job Types: Full-time, Contract Pay: $140,000.00 - $175,000.00 per year Application Question(s): Interested in Fulltime Opportunities (Y/N) Experience: Lead Data Architect : 3 years (Required) Data Engineering: 10 years (Required) AI Architecture: 3 years (Required) Location: South San Francisco, CA 94080 (Required) Work Location: In person