Data-AI Architect

dLocal; Barcelona; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible schedule

Fintech environment

Referral bonus

Work From Anywhere

Job summary

dLocal is seeking a Data Architect to shape a scalable, governed data ecosystem across Data & AI and engineering. You will connect data products, real-time platforms, analytical workloads, ML use cases, and business-facing data consumption with senior-level influence.

You will translate business needs into pragmatic designs, balancing scalability, reliability, latency, security, and cost. Hybrid work in Spain is possible and encouraged.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years designing scalable data architectures in complex environments.
• Experience with data-mesh principles and domain ownership.
• Deep knowledge of streaming and event-driven systems (Kafka/Kinesis).
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) and Databricks ecosystem.
• Strong governance, privacy, security, and observability focus.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve enterprise data architectures across batch/streaming.
• Lead data-mesh adoption and data-product thinking.
• Set reference architectures for data products, pipelines, and governance.
• Oversee latency, cost, reliability, and data quality in production.
• Guide MLOps and feature-platform capabilities for real-time use cases.

Skills

Data architecture

Data mesh

Streaming systems

Kafka

Kinesis

Flink

Spark

Databricks

AWS

GCP

Python

SQL

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Observability

MLOps

Feature stores

Data governance

Tools

Databricks

Unity Catalog

Delta Lake

Iceberg

dbt

Airflow

Kafka

Job description

Why Join dLocal?

dLocal is the financial infrastructure powering global commerce in the world's fastest-growing markets. The biggest companies in the world trust us to unlock growth in 60+ countries across emerging markets—moving money where others see complexity. We don't just process payments; we are architects of payment ecosystems and partners in our customers' expansion. You'll work alongside 1,300+ teammates from 40+ nationalities and tackle global challenges from day one.

Why Join dLocal?

dLocal is the financial infrastructure powering global commerce in the world's fastest-growing markets. The biggest companies in the world trust us to unlock growth in 60+ countries across emerging markets—moving money where others see complexity. We don't just process payments; we are architects of payment ecosystems and partners in our customers' expansion. You'll work alongside 1,300+ teammates from 40+ nationalities and tackle global challenges from day one.

What’s the opportunity?

We are looking for a Data Architect to provide the technical direction for dLocal’s data and analytics architecture. This role will shape a scalable, governed, and highly consumable data ecosystem across Data & AI and engineering—connecting domain-owned data products, real-time platforms, analytical workloads, machine-learning use cases, and business-facing data consumption.

You will act as a senior technical reference for architecture decisions, translating business and product needs into pragmatic designs that balance scalability, reliability, latency, security, interoperability, developer experience, and total cost of ownership.

What will I be doing?

• Define and evolve enterprise data architectures, evaluate trade-offs, and recommend fit-for-purpose technology patterns across batch, streaming, lakehouse, warehouse, and operational use cases.
• Review and advise other architects on the data aspects of their RFCs, helping ensure consistency with enterprise data principles, governance standards, and architectural direction.
• Lead the adoption of data–mesh principles, including domain-oriented ownership, data as a product, federated computational governance, self–serve platform capabilities, discoverability, quality, and measurable data–product SLAs.
• Establish reference architectures and engineering standards for data products, pipelines, ingestion, storage, processing, orchestration, observability, lineage, security, and access management.
• Provide oversight on operational SLAs, including latency, cost, quality, freshness, reliability, and production performance.
• Design and govern streaming architectures using technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Structured Streaming, and Databricks, supporting use cases from scheduled batch through sub‑second real‑time processing.
• Define reliable event‑processing patterns, including schema and data contracts, schema registries, event‑time processing, late‑event handling, idempotency, deduplication, replay and reprocessing, dead‑letter flows, and freshness SLAs.
• Shape semantic layers and enterprise ontologies that create consistent business meaning across domains, including canonical entities, metrics, dimensions, relationships, business definitions, metadata, lineage, and versioning.
• Establish patterns that allow semantic models to serve analytics, operational applications, machine learning, and AI use cases without creating duplicated or contradictory definitions.
• Guide the evolution of cloud data platforms and lakehouse capabilities, including Databricks, Unity Catalog, Delta/Iceberg tables, object storage, data warehouses, and BI consumption layers across AWS and GCP environments.
• Provide architectural direction for MLOps and feature‑platform capabilities, including batch and online features, model‑serving integrations, low‑latency data paths, model/data lineage, monitoring, and governance.
• Lead or contribute to architecture RFCs, technical decisions, design reviews, migration plans, and implementation roadmaps; make complex trade‑offs clear to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Partner with domain teams to clarify ownership, data‑product responsibilities, operational handover, quality accountability, access approval, and cross‑domain consumption models.
• Define practical controls for data quality, observability, privacy, security, resilience, cost management, and production readiness.
• Take ownership of critical architectural issues, facilitate resolution across teams, and ensure decisions are followed through to implementation and operation.
• Act as a trusted advisor and technical mentor to data engineers, platform teams, data scientists, MLOps engineers, BI teams, and engineering leaders.
• Communicate a cohesive architectural vision while remaining pragmatic, adaptable, and close enough to implementation to validate that designs work in production.

What skills do I need?

• 8-10+ years of experience designing and operating scalable data architectures, preferably in complex enterprise or high‑growth environments.
• Strong experience designing and implementing data‑mesh architectures and operating models, including domain ownership, data products, federated governance, self‑serve platforms, contracts, quality, and discoverability.
• Deep experience with streaming and event‑driven architectures, including Kafka or Kinesis and one or more processing engines such as Flink or Spark Structured Streaming.
• Demonstrated ability to design for real‑time and near‑real‑time workloads, including latency measurement, event‑time semantics, late data, state, deduplication, idempotency, replay, and failure recovery.
• Strong knowledge of semantic layers, business ontologies, canonical data models, knowledge graphs or metadata models, metric definitions, and semantic governance.
• Expertise in data modeling, data lake and lakehouse patterns, warehouse design, data pipelines, data products, metadata, lineage, and data management technologies.
• Experience with cloud data platforms and services, particularly AWS and/or GCP; experience with Databricks, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Iceberg, or comparable technologies is valuable.
• Proficiency with relevant data and platform technologies such as Spark, Airflow, dbt, Kafka, Python, SQL, CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code, and observability tooling.
• Experience architecting or supporting MLOps, feature stores, online/offline data serving, or other low‑latency machine‑learning data systems.
• Ability to establish practical frameworks for data access, stewardship, governance, privacy, security, quality, and operational accountability.
• Strong understanding of reliability, scalability, performance, resilience, cost, and vendor lock‑in trade‑offs.
• Excellent stakeholder‑management, communication, facilitation, and influencing skills, including the ability to balance delivery expectations and technical excellence.
• Comfortable managing risk, ambiguity, and conflict; able to make decisions and explain the reasoning behind them.
• Self‑sufficient and proactive, with the judgment to know when to seek input and when to move forward.

What do we offer?

• Flexibility in how you work: We focus on impact and productivity over fixed hours. This means our teams have flexible schedules and, depending on your role and location, you will combine self‑managed focus time with moments of in‑person connection in our collaboration hubs
• Fintech industry: work in a dynamic and ever‑evolving environment, with plenty to build and boost your creativity
• Referral bonus program: our internal talents are the best recruiters - refer someone ideal for a role and get rewarded
• Work From Anywhere: Team members can work while traveling for up to 3 months every year

What happens after you apply?

Our Talent Acquisition team is invested in creating the best candidate experience possible, so don’t worry, you will definitely hear from us. We will review your CV and keep you posted by email at every step of the process! Also, you can check out our webpage, Linkedin and Youtube for more about dLocal!

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.