Principal Data Architect

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

📋 Description

• Define and guide the enterprise data architecture strategy, target state, and multi-year roadmap for Mercury’s data platform.

• Establish reference architectures, standards, and guidelines for data ingestion, transformation, modeling, orchestration, quality, observability, and consumption.

• Drive architectural decisions for enterprise data platforms, including EDW, lakehouse, streaming, operational data integration, and domain-oriented data products.

• Collaborate with senior Technology and business leaders to align data investments with enterprise priorities, business value, and long-term scalability.

• Assess the current-state architecture, identify gaps, and lead the rationalization of tools, patterns, and technical debt within the data ecosystem.

• Provide technical direction and architectural leadership to data engineering, analytics engineering, and platform teams.

• Set standards for design quality, model integrity, operational excellence, and scalable delivery across the Enterprise Data & Operations function.

• Mentor engineers and technical leaders in architectural thinking, modern engineering practices, and excellence in delivery.

• Design, develop, and manage end-to-end enterprise data solutions supporting various data domains, data marts, and analytics use cases.

• Ensure the creation of scalable batch and streaming data pipelines to support enterprise reporting and advanced analytics environments.

• Take ownership of the reliability, quality, consistency, and observability of Mercury’s core data assets and pipelines.

• Define service levels and operational standards for essential data products and pipelines.

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and business teams to ensure the data platform delivers tangible business outcomes.

• Lead proof of concepts, architecture reviews, and technology evaluations for new tools and capabilities.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.

• 12+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or leadership of enterprise data platforms.

• 5-10 years of experience in leading, mentoring, and developing high-performing data engineering or analytics engineering teams.

• Proven experience in defining enterprise data strategy and spearheading large-scale modernization of data pipelines, platforms, and models.

• In-depth expertise in enterprise data modeling, including 3NF, dimensional, star, and snowflake patterns, with a solid judgment on modeling real-world business processes.

• Strong experience in redesigning foundational data models and pipelines with an emphasis on scalability, usability, and reliability.

• Expert-level skills in SQL and Python, with significant production experience in Informatica and dbt, including models, testing, and package management.

• Familiarity with orchestration frameworks such as Airflow, Dagster, Tivoli, or similar tools.

• Experience with streaming and event-driven data technologies such as Kafka or comparable platforms.

• Practical experience with modern warehouse and lakehouse platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or BigQuery.

• Strong understanding of cloud-native engineering practices across AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Demonstrated commitment to engineering best practices, including Git, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, testing, and DRY design principles.

• Experience implementing data quality, observability, lineage, and operational controls in production environments.

• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical leaders.

• A data product mindset with the capability to translate business needs into architecture, roadmaps, and execution plans.

• Experience in insurance, SaaS, or marketplace environments is a plus.

• Experience utilizing GenAI or LLM platforms such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini to address significant business and engineering challenges is strongly preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation.

• Flexibility to work from anywhere in the United States for most positions.

• Paid time off (including vacation time, sick leave, 9 paid Company holidays, and volunteer hours).

• Incentive bonus programs (potential for holiday bonuses, referral bonuses, and performance-based bonuses).

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and pet insurance.

• 401 (k) retirement savings plan with company matching.

• Engaging work environment.

• Opportunities for promotion.

• Education assistance.

• Professional and personal development opportunities.

• Company recognition program.

• Health and well-being resources, including free mental well-being therapy/coaching sessions, child and eldercare resources, and more.