Job Description
We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Engineer / Senior Data Architect to lead the design, architecture, and scalability of modern data platforms. This role requires deep expertise in building enterprise-grade data ecosystems across cloud, real-time, batch, governance, and AI-ready infrastructure. You will own the end-to-end data architecture vision from ingestion and transformation to analytics, ML enablement, governance, and cost optimization.
Key Responsibilities Architecture & Platform Design
- Architect scalable data lakehouse and warehouse platforms
- Define canonical data models and domain-driven data architecture
- Design medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold) architectures
- Establish data standards, governance, and security frameworks
- Evaluate and select cloud-native data tools
Engineering & Implementation Leadership
- Build high-performance ETL/ELT pipelines (batch + streaming)
- Architect real-time data pipelines using event-driven systems
- Optimize large-scale distributed data processing systems
- Implement CI/CD for data engineering workflows
- Ensure reliability, scalability, and observability
Cloud & Modern Data Stack Expertise
- Hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud
- Strong expertise in Databricks, Snowflake, Apache Kafka, Airflow.
Analytics & AI Enablement
- Design data platforms optimized for BI and AI workloads
- Enable feature stores and ML-ready datasets
- Support GenAI and advanced analytics use cases
- Ensure high data quality and lineage tracking
Governance, Security & Cost Optimization
- Implement RBAC, encryption, and data masking
- Design cost-aware architectures
- Monitor usage and optimize cloud spend
- Define data SLAs and reliability frameworks.
Leadership & Strategy
- Lead and mentor data engineering teams
- Conduct architecture reviews
- Partner with product, AI, and business teams
- Define long-term data strategy and roadmap
- Drive technical excellence and coding standards.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in data engineering / data architecture
- Proven experience designing large-scale data platforms
- Deep expertise in distributed systems
- Strong SQL and Python/Scala skills
- Experience handling TB-PB scale datasets
- Strong understanding of data modeling (dimensional + data vault)
- Experience with real-time and streaming architecture
- Experience leading technical teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in FinTech, SaaS, or enterprise consulting
- Experience building data engineering practice from scratch
- Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure
- Certifications in AWS/Azure/GCP
- Experience with multi-cloud environments
(ref:hirist.tech)
