Lead Data Architect – AI Driven Modeling & Governance
Job ID: 110514
Location: Houston, TX [Flex]
Salary: $70.00 - $75.00/hr
Category: App/Dev
Employment Type: Contract
Our client is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Lead Data Architect to join their team. This pivotal role will focus on AI-driven modeling and governance within the enterprise data structures. The successful candidate will be responsible for architecting and optimizing the data lake-house, ensuring seamless integration and functionality for advanced AI workloads, and self-service analytics. This full-time position offers a unique opportunity to lead and innovate in a cutting-edge technological environment, leveraging AI to enhance data governance and architecture.
Responsibilities:
- Translate complex business-driven use cases into technical specifications and designs that meet the needs of end-users.
- Design and evolve data architectures from bronze to gold layers in our medallion framework, focusing on developing robust semantic models for business analytics.
- Implement and manage slowly changing dimensions and hierarchical structures associated with key performance indicators across various business domains.
- Maintain and enhance a centralized data dictionary, ensuring all metadata, lineage, and quality rules are up-to-date and accessible.
- Deploy and manage AI-driven governance tools such as Microsoft Purview to automate metadata management, data classification, and governance compliance.
- Chair and lead data model review boards, collaborating with BI and AI teams to ensure alignment on data models and governance standards.
- Develop and enforce data contracts, governance policies, and stewardship practices to uphold data integrity and security across the organization.
- Design and implement AI-enhanced business intelligence solutions, optimizing data models for natural language processing and AI queries.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, AI, or a related technical field.
- Minimum of 8 years of experience in data architecture, with at least 5 years focused on star schema design on cloud platforms.
- Strong proficiency with Microsoft Data Platform tools, including Azure Synapse, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric.
- Demonstrated ability to build and manage data integration and processing pipelines, preferably with experience in GraphQL and API integrations.
- Experience with AI/ML model operationalization, including familiarity with architectures like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
- Expertise in implementing enterprise-level data governance and security frameworks, with a strong understanding of automated governance tools.
- Excellent leadership, mentorship, and team collaboration skills.
- Strong communication and documentation abilities, capable of effectively articulating complex data concepts to a diverse stakeholder audience.
- Experience with SCRUM Agile methodologies and Azure DevOps practices is highly desirable.
- Certifications in Microsoft Azure, Data Engineering, or Solutions Architecture are preferred.