Senior Data Architect

About the position

GCI's Senior Data Architect supports the Director of Data Architecture’s mission to implement an enterprise data platform that enables data-driven decision-making in support of various business functions, aligning with organization vision and strategy. Responsible for analyzing, designing, and implementing architectural frameworks, data interfaces, tooling, and data quality technology to meet organizational needs for data management, accessibility, performance, and quality.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts to ensure that data architecture effectively supports application and analytics needs.
• Design and develop an enterprise data lake, ensuring it supports a wide range of data types and formats while being scalable, reliable, secure, and efficient.
• Establish and enforce architectural frameworks and best practices, like medallion architecture, that guide the development of the data lake.
• Design and develop data models and pipelines that ensure data quality and are optimized to support self-serve analytics.
• Directly or with assistance of data engineering teams, integrate new data sources into the data lake, ensuring data is accessible and usable for analytics and reporting.
• Document essential technical architecture design and analysis efforts, including postmortem project documentation and metric collection.
• Mentor peers in the discipline of data architecture, providing guidance on technical skills and best practices.
• Implement data quality technologies and processes to monitor, assess, and provide insight to improve data accuracy and reliability.
• Collaborate with stakeholders and data governance leads to define data quality metric requirements for the data lake and ensure compliance with organizational standards.
• Help ensure that all data architecture practices adhere to organizational policies, industry regulations, and best practices.
• Implement tools and processes to track data lineage, ensuring transparency and traceability of data from source to consumption.
• Assist in implementing a strategic vision for data architecture that aligns with GCI’s business objectives and data management goals.
• Help define the architectural and logical requirements of data platforms.
• Engage with cross-functional teams, including data engineering, analytics, and business units, to ensure that data architecture aligns with business needs and enhances overall data management practices.
• On an ongoing basis evaluate the current technology and data environment to identify critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in data architecture and management, fostering continuous improvement and innovation within the data platform.
• Drive continuous improvement and innovation within the enterprise data platform in the areas of system performance, user experience and cost management.
• Ability to maintain professional skillset by advancing credentials, participating in training, continuing educational opportunities, and technical organizations.
• Ability to share technical skills, knowledge, and techniques with other technical staff.
• Ability to transfer knowledge to team members and customers.
• Ability to accurately communicate information virtually (i.e., Teams), over the phone, and in-person in a clear and concise manner to a range of audiences.
• Ability to accurately read, write, and respond to business correspondence such as emails, chat messages, policies, procedures, reports.
• Ability to create clear and concise written communication (i.e., detailed documentation, diagramming, slide presentations) for a variety of audiences, including developers, business analysts, and business users.
• Ability to initiate and deliver technical information in presentation/training format in front of stakeholders.
• Proven ability to manage complex projects and strategic initiatives.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Requirements

• A combination of relevant work experience and/or education sufficient to perform the duties of the job may substitute to meet the total years required on a year-for-year basis.
• High School diploma or equivalent.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Systems Analysis, Engineering, or related field.
• Minimum of ten (10) years of experience in software development or similar technical role.
• Including a minimum of four (4) years of data architecture and design experience.

Nice-to-haves

• Master’s degree or PhD in relevant field.
• Databricks Architecture/Data Engineering experience.
• Telecommunications experience.
• Relevant telecom industry or job specific certifications.