What does a Data Architect do?

A Data Architect designs the overall structure and standards for how an organization stores, models, and moves data. They define the warehouse and pipeline architecture, set governance and naming conventions, and guide engineers so systems stay consistent and scalable. The role is strategic and cross-team rather than focused on writing day-to-day pipeline code.

What are the main responsibilities of a Data Architect?

Core duties include data modeling, defining warehouse and integration architecture, and establishing governance, lineage, and security standards. Data Architects also review designs from engineering teams, plan migrations off legacy systems, and advise leadership on platform and tooling decisions.

What skills does a Data Architect need?

Deep data modeling and SQL skills are foundational, alongside experience with modern warehouse platforms and ETL or ELT design. Because the role spans many teams, strong communication and governance knowledge matter as much as technical depth, since the architect must get engineers to build to a shared standard.

What should a Data Architect job description include?

A strong Data Architect job description states the definition and brief, then lists key responsibilities, full duties, and senior-level requirements. Specifying your cloud platform, warehouse, and governance maturity helps candidates gauge scope, since architecture work looks very different in a startup versus a regulated enterprise.

Who does a Data Architect work with?

Data Architects work with data engineers, analytics and BI teams, and platform or infrastructure engineers. They also partner with security, compliance, and business stakeholders, and often report to a head of data or CTO who relies on them for platform strategy.

Data & AI

Data Architect Job Description

Data Analyst Data Scientist Machine Learning Engineer Data Engineer Business Analyst AI Engineer Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst Database Administrator (DBA)MLOps Engineer

About the role

We need a Data Architect to define how data is modeled, stored, and moved across our entire platform. You will set the blueprint for our warehouse, pipelines, and governance, balancing performance, cost, and long-term maintainability while guiding engineers on how to build against it. This is a role for someone who thinks in systems and can turn scattered, inconsistent data into a coherent foundation the whole company can trust.

Key responsibilities

Design the enterprise data model and warehouse architecture
Set data standards, governance, and integration patterns
Guide engineering teams on scalable, secure data design

Responsibilities

Design logical and physical data models for transactional and analytical systems
Define the target architecture for data warehouses, lakes, and lakehouse platforms
Establish naming conventions, schema standards, and canonical data definitions across teams
Design ingestion and integration patterns for batch and streaming data sources
Set data governance, lineage, cataloging, and master data management practices
Review pipeline and schema designs from engineers and enforce architectural standards
Plan partitioning, indexing, and storage strategies that balance performance and cost
Define access controls, data classification, and privacy-by-design across sensitive datasets
Create migration roadmaps when consolidating or replatforming legacy data systems
Advise leadership on build-versus-buy decisions for data platform tooling

Requirements

Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, information systems, or a related field
7 or more years in data engineering or database roles, including data architecture responsibility
Deep experience with data modeling and modern warehouse platforms such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift
Proven track record designing data platforms that scaled across multiple teams or products
Strong grasp of data governance, security, and regulatory requirements such as GDPR

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