Data Architect

Photon; Irving (TX); On-site; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Photon is seeking a Data Architect to lead the data architecture for fraud, integrating customer, transaction, and fraud data across systems. You will design scalable, high-volume data pipelines and partner with cross‑functional teams to translate business needs into robust technical solutions.

The role emphasizes data governance, security, and the delivery of trusted data for analytics and real-time decisioning, with leadership in design and production rollout.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and implementing a Data as a Product strategy.
• Familiarity with lakehouse architectures and ETL-free approaches such as data virtualization or data mesh.
• Fraud domain experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the data architecture for Fraud across multiple data sources.
• Design an ecosystem for a unified view of customer relationships, transactions, and fraud signals.
• Work hands-on with engineering teams to define data models, data structures, and data flows.

Skills

Data as a Product

Data architecture

Lakehouse architectures

Data virtualization

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Data Engineering/Information Systems

Job description

We are Photon, one of the world's largest Digital Platform Engineering companies providing a combination of Strategy Consulting, Creative Design and Technology Services to a wide range of customers. We work with 40% of the Fortune 100 companies.

For a brief 1 minute video about us, you can check https://youtu.be/uJWBWQZEA6o.

About the Role:

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the data architecture for Fraud, integrating customer, account, transaction, payment, channel, device, behavioral, and fraud-related data across multiple source systems.
• Design an ecosystem that enables a unified view of customer relationships, transactions, interactions, and fraud signals.
• Work hands-on with engineering teams to define data models, data structures, data flows, ingestion patterns, transformation logic, and consumption patterns.
• Architect scalable solutions for high-volume and high-velocity data using distributed Big Data technologies.
• Design batch, near-real-time, and streaming data pipelines supporting fraud detection, monitoring, analytics, and decisioning.
• Define conceptual, logical, and physical data models across customer and fraud domains.
• Establish integration patterns across legacy systems, enterprise data platforms, APIs, messaging, and distributed data environments.
• Review existing data platforms and identify opportunities to simplify data movement, eliminate duplication, improve accessibility, and establish trusted data sources.
• Partner with Fraud, Data, Engineering, AI/ML, Risk, and Architecture teams to translate business requirements into implementable technical solutions.
• Ensure appropriate data quality, lineage, metadata, security, privacy, traceability, and governance controls.
• Support data consumption for fraud analytics, AI/ML models, operational workflows, investigations, and real-time decisioning.
• Provide technical leadership through design, development, implementation, performance tuning, and production rollout.

Qualification

• Experience designing and implementing a "Data as a Product" strategy, treating data assets as discoverable, trusted, and consumable products across the organization
• Familiarity with modern data architecture techniques, including lakehouse architectures and ETL-free approaches such as data virtualization or data mesh
• Fraud domain experience is a plus

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field required