Location: Glen Allen, VA
Job Type: Full-Time
Target Salary Range: $100,000 - $155,000
- This represents the potential salary range for this position depending on education level, years of experience and/or certifications in addition to other position specific requirements which may impact salary
Position Overview
The Lead Data Architect provides strategic and hands-on leadership across divisional data initiatives, guiding delivery teams in building scalable data solutions within a modern cloud-based data ecosystem. This role balances high-level architecture with practical execution, ensuring data solutions align with business needs, performance requirements, and long-term architecture goals.
Key Responsibilities
Data Architecture Leadership
- Provide architectural guidance to two or three concurrent data delivery teams, typically consisting of 4–5 engineers per team, across data initiatives.
- Design and evolve data architecture across a Databricks-first lakehouse within a broader Azure ecosystem.
- Understand both target-state architecture and appropriate technical trade-offs.
- Lead without direct reporting authority by influencing teams through expertise and collaboration.
Solution Design and Delivery Support
- Partner with engineering teams to support detailed solution design and implementation through design reviews, guidance, and targeted hands-on contribution where needed.
- Specify data solutions that meet non-functional requirements, including scalability, performance, and reliability.
- Assess technical challenges and problems, provide options, and make recommendations.
- Perform technology evaluations in support of delivery teams, providing appropriate recommendations and reasoning.
Data Integration and Implementation Guidance
- Guide ingestion and integration strategies, including API-based data exchange.
- Support data initiatives involving structured and unstructured data.
- Apply knowledge of relational and non-relational solutions to data architecture decisions.
Role Expectations
- With support from the team, ramp to a high degree of independence within the first six months.
- Know when to make independent decisions and when to circle back to the broader team with appropriate questions.
- Work within a new domain by identifying gaps in knowledge and actively seeking answers.
Qualifications
Experience
- 7–10 years of progressive experience in data engineering, pipeline development, and data architecture roles developing data lakes and data warehouses.
- Background progressing from developer through at least team lead.
- Strong experience designing and working with the full lifecycle of data-centric architectures.
- Hands-on experience with cloud development in Databricks.
- Experience with structured and unstructured data, such as JSON, files, and media.
- Understanding of relational and non-relational solutions.
- Understanding of APIs and data integration patterns.
Skills
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Strong stakeholder influence skills.
- Ability to make independent decisions when appropriate.
- Ability to identify knowledge gaps and actively seek answers when working within a new domain.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Guidewire InsuranceSuite data.
- Azure Solutions Architect certification.
- Experience working in Property and Casualty insurance data domains.
- Understanding of London and international markets.