Cloud & Platform Architect (Snowflake / Azure)

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical review of Snowflake infrastructure SAP integration pipelines and the bronze/raw ingestion layer.
• Assess identity federation and security models across Snowflake and Azure and define target-state access patterns.
• Evaluate architectural options for native cross-cloud consumption including Azure-native access and Apache Iceberg feasibility.
• Recommend ingestion tooling and standards for the silver-layer conformance pipelines.
• Support the reference-pattern build with h ands-on platform configuration guidance (not implementation) for the pilot domain(s).
• Ingestion mechanics: Snowpipe / Snowpipe Streaming, Kafka connector, batch vs. streaming trade-offs for bronze-layer loading
• Performance/cost: clustering keys, search optimization service, query acceleration service, warehouse auto-suspend/scaling policy design
• Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Event Hubs needs working knowledge of where these compete with vs. complement Snowflake
• Cost and latency implications of Azure-native access to Snowflake-managed data vs. direct Snowflake consumption
• Iceberg internals: metadata layer, catalog options (Snowflake Open Catalog/Polaris, AWS Glue, Nessie)
• Multi-engine read/write patterns — Spark, Trino, Snowflake all reading the same Iceberg tables — since the whole point of adopting Iceberg is avoiding vendor lock-in for select gold products
• External volumes and storage integration configuration
• Infrastructure-as-code for Snowflake (Terraform provider, schema change or similar)
• CI/CD pipeline design for data pipeline deployments

Required Experience & Skills

• 10+ years in cloud data platform architecture with deep current h ands-on Snowflake expertise (performance security data sharing and platform administration).
• Working expertise in Azure-native data services and identity (Entra ID/Azure AD) integration patterns.
• Practical exposure to Apache Iceberg or other open table formats in a production or serious pilot context.
• Experience assessing SAP-to-cloud integration pipelines from a platform (not functional/SAP-module) perspective.

Qualifications & Certifications (preferred)

• SnowPro Core and/or SnowPro Advanced certifications.
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (or equivalent).