Principal IT Data Architect - Snowflake, Data Governance & AI Platforms

Overview

The Principal IT Data Architect defines and leads data architecture strategy for secure, reliable, scalable, and accessible data supporting business operations, analytics, and AI initiatives. The role provides technical leadership for enterprise data platforms, integrations, governance, and architecture decisions.

What you'll do

• Define and maintain the enterprise data architecture strategy, standards, and roadmap.
• Design conceptual, logical, and physical data models supporting commercial business processes.
• Establish architecture principles, patterns, and best practices that improve scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Evaluate and approve solution designs for alignment with enterprise architecture standards.
• Lead the architecture and evolution of enterprise cloud data platforms, with a focus on Snowflake.
• Design modern data lakehouse architectures, semantic layers, and data consumption frameworks.
• Drive adoption of advanced platform capabilities supporting analytics, AI, and business intelligence.
• Ensure platforms meet performance, reliability, scalability, security, and cost optimization objectives.
• Design enterprise data integration frameworks connecting business applications, analytics platforms, and external data sources.
• Define standards for ETL/ELT processes, APIs, event-driven architectures, and real-time data movement.
• Establish and promote best practices for data governance, metadata management, data quality, and master data management.
• Ensure data lineage, traceability, consistency, and compliance requirements are addressed.
• Enable enterprise reporting, analytics, AI, and machine learning initiatives through data architecture.
• Partner with business, analytics, and data science teams to develop scalable and reusable data products.
• Define architecture patterns supporting advanced analytics, Generative AI, and intelligent automation capabilities.
• Translate business objectives into scalable data solutions.
• Design secure data architectures complying with global privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.
• Implement data protection, access controls, auditing, monitoring, and governance capabilities.
• Partner with cybersecurity and compliance teams to mitigate enterprise data risks.
• Advise business and technology leaders on strategic data architecture decisions.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide guidance on complex enterprise initiatives.
• Mentor architects, engineers, and technical teams while fostering architectural excellence.
• Collaborate across global teams to drive delivery of enterprise data programs.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
• 14+ years of experience in Data Architecture, Data Engineering, or Enterprise Architecture.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and supporting Snowflake-based data solutions.
• Strong expertise in data modeling, data warehousing, lakehouse architectures, and cloud-based data platforms.
• Advanced expertise with Snowflake architecture, governance, and AI capabilities.
• Experience with Snowflake Cortex AI, Semantic Views, or agentic AI solutions.
• Experience with Databricks, Informatica Cloud, Coalesce, dbt, or Airflow.
• Experience designing enterprise-scale integration, analytics, and data management solutions.
• Deep understanding of data governance, metadata management, data quality, and master data management practices.
• Experience working with cloud technologies (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP experience also considered).
• Strong business acumen with the ability to connect technology strategy to business outcomes.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills, including experience working with senior leadership.
• Experience operating within global, matrixed organizations.

Nice to have

• Master's degree in a related technical discipline.
• Familiarity with Salesforce, CPQ, commercial systems, and marketing technology platforms.
• Experience supporting AI/ML or Generative AI solutions in production environments.
• Experience within healthcare, medical device, life sciences, or other regulated industries.
• Relevant certifications such as SnowPro Advanced, Azure Data Engineer, TOGAF, or equivalent.

Details

• Location: Nanakramguda, Hyderabad, India.