Senior Snowflake Architect - Enterprise Data & AI Cloud

Falcon Smart IT (FalconSmartIT); City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Falcon Smart IT in Edinburgh is seeking a Senior Data Architect to define enterprise data strategy and lead Snowflake-based modernization across ingestion, storage, processing, and governance. You will drive architecture decisions, mentor teams, and partner with stakeholders to deliver scalable data platforms.

The role requires extensive Snowflake experience, deep data modeling skills, and strong orchestration/CI/CD capabilities across cloud environments.

Qualifications

• Over 20 years in data architecture and engineering, with 8–10+ years in lead/enterprise architect roles.
• Hands-on Snowflake architecture experience for large-scale data platforms.

Responsibilities

• Define the enterprise data strategy and reference architectures anchored on Snowflake AI Data Cloud.
• Lead modernization and migration programs from legacy EDW to Snowflake with migration roadmaps and cutover plans.
• Govern data modeling standards (star/snowflake, Data Vault, 3NF) and semantic layers.
• Establish ELT/ETL and streaming architectures on Snowflake with dbt, Airflow, and Snowflake Tasks.
• Implement security-by-design in Snowflake e.g., RBAC, dynamic data masking and key management.
• Embed data quality, observability, and lineage with Horizon Catalog and data governance.
• Architect cross-region/cross-cloud data sharing and failover strategies.
• Drive Snowflake cost optimization and FinOps practices.
• Enable AI-ready architectures on Snowflake for governed AI integrations.
• Partner with business/engineering to translate requirements into scalable Snowflake architectures.
• Produce architecture artifacts and ensure governance alignment.
• Mentor engineers and data modelers; conduct design/code reviews.

Skills

Snowflake architecture

Data modeling

SQL

Python

Data governance

CI/CD

IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)

ETL/ELT orchestration

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

Terraform

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Job description

Falcon Smart IT in Edinburgh is seeking a Senior Data Architect to define enterprise data strategy and lead Snowflake-based modernization across ingestion, storage, processing, and governance. You will drive architecture decisions, mentor teams, and partner with stakeholders to deliver scalable data platforms.

The role requires extensive Snowflake experience, deep data modeling skills, and strong orchestration/CI/CD capabilities across cloud environments.