Data Architect – Contractor

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Serve as the connection between technical implementation and business realities. Collaborate directly with stakeholders in Finance, Label Services, Marketing, Operations, and Executive Leadership to define how business data should be represented. This involves guiding decisions on metric definitions, ownership of the source of truth, reconciliation rules, and managing exceptions when systems diverge.

• Design the data warehouse, including schemas, transformation layers, semantic conventions, and access patterns. Your structural decisions will influence how all downstream teams query the business.

• Oversee integration efforts across various systems: entity resolution, aggregation, and reconciliation. Since artists, songs, venues, and partners do not share canonical IDs between FUGA, Luminate, Chartmetric, Salesforce, and Airtable, you will define how these will be aligned. Additionally, you will determine authoritative sources for streams, royalties, and revenue numbers reported by different systems when discrepancies arise. Integration of Salesforce and RAMP (cost data) is also required.

• Lead a small delivery team, consisting of data engineers and application contractors, tasked with building the warehouse, transformation layer, reconciliation pipelines, and analytics experiences. While you are not expected to be the primary front-end developer, you should be proficient in defining the data contracts and architectural patterns that these applications depend on.

• Select and implement transformation tools (such as dbt, SQLMesh, Dataform, or alternatives). Engage in open discussions about the trade-offs; we do not have a strict preference at this stage.

• Establish standards for testability, observability, and data quality monitoring throughout the warehouse.

⛳️ Requirements

• 3 to 8+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data architecture. We prioritize demonstrated production ownership over years of experience. Candidates should showcase hands-on experience in designing data models, integrating various systems, and making architectural decisions in practical settings.

• Strong engineering fundamentals are essential. We expect candidates to independently design systems, write code, debug integrations, and analyze data architecture without depending on AI tools. Familiarity with modern AI-assisted development processes is encouraged but does not replace core technical skills.

• Extensive experience in integrating complex data from diverse sources — aggregation, entity matching, and reconciliation. You've built or led systems that unify identities and reconcile data across disparate feeds, and can articulate the trade-offs involved (deterministic vs. probabilistic matching, human-in-the-loop review, source-side keying vs. downstream resolution, and managing conflicting sources of truth).

• Experience in managing teams engaged in this type of work. This includes not only overseeing engineers but also guiding them through ambiguous integration projects where rules are not documented and data can be challenging.

• Proven experience integrating with 5+ external SaaS platforms using APIs, exports, or third-party connectors. Comfort with irregular, undocumented, vendor-specific data formats is necessary.

• Excellent communication skills. You will engage with engineers, analysts, finance partners, and label executives — sometimes within the same meeting.

• Comfortable taking ownership of architectural decisions and documenting them thoroughly. Create documents that endure beyond the tenure of their authors.

• A BS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrated experience will also be considered.

🏝️ Benefits

• PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A SHORT TERM CONTRACTED POSITION