Senior Data Architect

Job Description

About the Role

Irth is building a modern, multi‑cloud, enterprise‑grade data estate—a unified Databricks‑based platform that consolidates data across all Irth products, spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. We are seeking a Senior Data Architect to lead the design, governance, and strategic direction of this data estate and to work closely with data engineering teams to bring it to life.

This is a high‑impact, highly visible technical leadership role responsible for defining the medallion architecture, ensuring robust governance and security, and enabling scalable analytics, AI/ML, and cross‑product insights.

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Architecture & Design (Primary Responsibility)

• Design the high‑level and detailed architecture blueprint for Irth’s new Databricks‑based data estate, including lakehouse patterns, medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold), and semantic layers.
• Develop a multi‑cloud ingestion and consolidation strategy for data sourced from AWS (S3, RDS, DynamoDB), Azure (SQL MI, Storage Accounts), GCP, and on‑prem systems.
• Define patterns for data lineage, metadata management, data quality, CDC/SCD, streaming and batch ingestion, and federated query capabilities.
• Establish an enterprise‑level data governance model, including classification schemas, residency rules, cataloging (Unity Catalog), retention policies, and security standards.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to enforce GDPR, PIPEDA, Australian Privacy Act, SOC 2, and other regulatory requirements.
• Architect for scalability, reliability, cost‑efficiency, and support of downstream analytics, reporting, GIS workflows, and AI/ML workloads.
• Produce architectural documentation, diagrams, runbooks, and design standards / best practices.

2. Implementation Leadership & Engineering Partnership

• Collaborate closely with a distributed team of data engineers to implement ingestion pipelines, Delta Lake storage patterns, orchestration workflows, and Databricks Lakeflow components.
• Provide technical leadership, code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands‑on support when needed.
• Ensure architecture is implemented consistently across tenants, clouds, products, and engineering teams.
• Work with DevOps/Platform teams on infrastructure, identity, networking, VPC/VNet, and CI/CD integration.
• Establish monitoring, observability, and operational governance for the data estate.

3. Data Governance, Security & Compliance

• Define and enforce RBAC/ABAC policies, encryption standards, audit logging, and tenant‑level isolation.
• Partner with governance teams to unify metadata and lineage across all sources via Unity Catalog and Purview integration.
• Ensure ongoing compliance with data residency and cloud‑specific regulatory constraints.
• Develop standards for retention, archival, disaster recovery, and cross‑region protections.

4. Analytics, AI/ML, and Product Enablement

• Architect support for operational reporting, BI (Power BI, Databricks SQL), semantic modeling, and consumption patterns.
• Design foundations enabling AI/ML use cases such as predictive risk modeling, summarization, geospatial analytics, and LLM‑driven insights.
• Advance a BI‑tool‑agnostic semantic model strategy for consistent business definitions across products.

5. Thought Leadership & Collaboration

• Serve as Irth’s senior expert on Databricks Lakehouse architecture, modern data engineering, and multi‑cloud data strategy.
• Mentor engineers and analysts in best practices for data modeling, governance, pipeline design, and scalable architectures.
• Partner with product teams, executives, and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical data solutions.
• Participate in vendor evaluations, roadmap planning, and architectural governance boards.

Requirements

Required

• 8+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or platform architecture, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead role.
• Deep expertise with Databricks (Azure preferred), including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, SQL Warehouses, Lakehouse design, and pipeline orchestration.
• Strong experience building multi‑cloud or hybrid data architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Expert in medallion architecture, lakehouse design patterns, metadata management, lineage, and enterprise governance.
• Advanced SQL and experience with one or more: Python, Scala, PySpark, Spark SQL.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, RBAC/ABAC, encryption, and data residency considerations.
• Experience with CDC, SCD Type 1/2, streaming ingestion, batch pipelines, and workload performance optimization.
• Demonstrated ability to translate highly complex technical concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• Strong documentation, diagramming, architectural review, and communication skills.

Preferred

• Experience with Unity Catalog–Purview integration and enterprise metadata strategies.
• Background in geospatial data, operational risk modeling, or AI/ML enablement.
• Knowledge of Power BI semantic modeling or BI‑platform‑agnostic semantic layer design.
• Experience with highly regulated or multi‑tenant data environments.
• Certifications: Databricks Data Engineer Professional, Databricks Architect, Azure Data Architect, AWS/GCP data certifications.

High-Level Success Metrics

• Unified Databricks Lakehouse deployed with all product/tenant data ingested.
• High‑quality lineage coverage and governance adoption.
• Compliance with all residency and regulatory policies.
• Reduction in engineering overhead and faster delivery of analytics/AI use cases.
• Positive adoption and satisfaction across engineering, product, and analytics teams.

Benefits

• Join a dynamic, growing company that is well respected in its industry.
• Competitive salary
• Health plans options including medical, dental, & vision
• 401k (US), RSP (Canada) + company match 
• Flexible PTO policy plus company-paid holidays 
• Benefits options such as health insurance, life insurance, discounts and perks programs
• Generous “work from home” stipend to get you started
• Team events including monthly lunches for everyone, volunteer outings, and quarterly gatherings
• Hybrid employees have access to snacks, beverages and coffee at our Columbus office