NexZenTek

Data Architect

Remote job

Purpose of the Position

The Data Architect will be a critical member of the Data Architecture Team within the Enterprise Data Solutions Department, responsible for designing and guiding scalable, cloud-enabled enterprise data solutions. This role places a strong emphasis on architecting and implementing the Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold layers) within Databricks, ensuring high-quality data pipelines and models that support analytics, reporting, and AI/ML workloads.

The Data Architect will partner with business intelligence (BI) developers, data engineers, and business stakeholders to align enterprise data strategies with organizational goals. The role requires expertise in data modeling, cloud data platforms, and advanced data engineering frameworks, with the ability to enforce governance, observability, and best practices across the enterprise data landscape.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of Medallion Architecture in Databricks, ensuring structured ingestion (Bronze), cleansing and standardization (Silver), and curated business-ready data assets (Gold).
• Provide architectural guidance across Azure Data Services, Microsoft Fabric, and Databricks to support analytics and AI/ML initiatives.
• Develop and optimize conceptual, logical, and physical data models using Erwin Data Modeler, ensuring alignment with business needs and technical standards.
• Architect and support data engineering frameworks including PySpark, DBT, and Striim for both batch and real-time data processing.
• Partner with BI teams to design and optimize semantic models, data virtualization solutions, and Power BI datasets.
• Apply big data concepts to support scalability for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured datasets.
• Support AI/ML feature store and pipeline design within Databricks.
• Collaborate with data governance teams to enforce data observability, lineage, metadata management, and compliance.
• Evaluate tools such as Wherescape to improve automation of modeling and integration workflows.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to translate business requirements into robust technical specifications.
• Contribute to data architecture playbooks, standards, and best practices, ensuring consistency and reusability across the enterprise.

Education/Experience

• Required – Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Management, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• Required – 8+ years of experience in data architecture, data modeling, or enterprise data platform roles.
• Required – Demonstrated expertise with Databricks Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold layers).
• Required – Experience with Azure and/or Microsoft Fabric cloud data platforms.
• Required – Advanced proficiency with Erwin Data Modeler.
• Required – Hands-on experience with PySpark and data engineering frameworks.
• Required – Strong understanding of relational, dimensional, and big data modeling concepts.
• Required – Proven track record of delivering enterprise-scale data solutions in cloud and hybrid environments.

Associated Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

REQUIRED

• Platforms: Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks.
• Data Modeling: Erwin Data Modeler, ERDs, relational/dimensional/data vault models.
• Frameworks & Tools: DBT, Striim, PySpark, SQL.
• Architecture: Medallion Architecture, semantic model design, data virtualization.
• Concepts: Big Data, data observability, governance, and lineage.
• Methodology: Agile development, CI/CD practices for data engineering.

PREFERRED

• Familiarity with Wherescape.
• Hands-on exposure to Data Vault 2.0 methodologies.
• Experience preparing datasets for AI/ML pipelines and large language models.
• Knowledge of LLM, LangChain, and text processing workflows.