Summary
What you’ll impact
The organization is seeking a Principal Data Architect to lead data architecture for a VA AI platform, guiding senior engineers and VA leaders while building on a cloud platform with a data processing platform and a data governance solution. The remote, customer‑facing role combines hands‑on pipeline development experience with leadership and architectural design responsibilities.
Responsibilities
What you'll do
- Work with customers daily: lead architecture discussions, brief VA stakeholders, and turn their needs into clear designs and decisions
- Lead and mentor senior data engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on problem solving
- Set architecture and standards for ingestion, storage, modeling, and serving with Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Databricks, and Delta Lake
- Architect the platform's move to Azure Commercial, with Databricks as the engineering platform and Unity Catalog governing data, access, lineage, and models
- Design metadata-driven frameworks that move thousands of tables through batch, incremental, change data capture (CDC), and streaming patterns
- Serve reporting and machine learning workloads through the Synapse Dedicated Pool, Databricks SQL, Power BI, and model training pipelines
- Protect PHI and PII through access policy, masking, and Authority to Operate (ATO) support under HIPAA and federal security requirements
- Write architecture and technical approach sections for proposals
Requirements
What you’ll bring
- 12+ years in data engineering and data architecture, starting as a hands-on data engineer, with 5+ years as a lead or principal architect
- Proven leadership of engineering teams, including mentoring senior engineers and setting technical direction
- A demonstrated history of customer-facing work: leading architecture discussions, briefing executives, and writing for technical and non-technical readers
- Expert, hands-on cloud data engineering and data warehousing on Azure: Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics (including Synapse Dedicated Pool), Databricks, Delta Lake, and ADLS Gen2
- Hands-on Unity Catalog design: catalogs and grants, attribute-based access control, row filters and column masks, and lineage
- Design of lakehouse (medallion) architectures, data warehouse models, and metadata-driven frameworks across thousands of tables
- Strong proficiency in SQL and Python (PySpark)
- Experience with CDC, streaming, and incremental load patterns (e.g., Oracle GoldenGate, Azure Event Hubs, Apache Kafka)
- Experience migrating large on-premises data warehouses to the cloud, including parallel runs and reconciliation
- Experience with Git, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code for data platforms (e.g., Terraform, Databricks Asset Bundles)
- Working knowledge of HIPAA, NIST 800-53, and FISMA requirements for PHI and PII
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or a related field
- US Citizen: Must be a citizen of the United States
- Security Clearance: Must be able to obtain a public trust clearance. Must be eligible to work in the United States