Data Solutions Architect

Protective; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Protective is seeking a Data Solutions Architect to bridge business strategy and technical execution across analytics, reporting, and AI use cases. You will design end‑to‑end data solutions, including warehouses, lakes, and pipelines, ensuring security and scalability while partnering with engineers, product, and business leaders.

In this senior individual contributor role, you’ll set technical direction, influence multiple teams, and translate complex requirements into actionable roadmaps that

Qualifications

• Experience designing end-to-end data solutions across data warehouses, data lakes, and data pipelines.
• Ability to translate business needs into technical roadmaps and design patterns.
• Strong leadership and stakeholder management in a cross-functional environment.

Responsibilities

• Set and communicate the technical direction for data solutions across domains.
• Review, approve, and challenge designs proposed by delivery teams.
• Drive alignment across teams and document architectural decisions.

Skills

Data architecture

Leadership

Cross-domain collaboration

Cloud platforms

Data governance

Job description

The work we do has an impact on millions of lives, and you can be a part of it.

Wehelp protect our customers against life’s uncertainties.Regardless ofwhere you work within thecompany, you’ll behelping provide protection and peace of mind when our customers need it most.

The Data Solutions Architect is a senior individual contributor who serves as a bridge between business strategy and technical execution, designing end‑to‑end data solutions that enable analytics, reporting, and AI use cases across the enterprise. This role combines deep data architectureexpertisewith solution design and technical leadership responsibilities—creating practical, scalable, and secure data solutions that translate business needs into actionable technical roadmaps.

This position is embedded closer to delivery teams, working hands‑on with business partners, engineers, and product teams to ensure data solutions are usable, compliant, and aligned to Protective’s priorities.

While this role has no direct reports, it carries significant leadership accountability. The Data Solutions Architect is expected to set technical direction, drive alignment across independent teams, and influence outcomes through expertise, credibility, and relationships rather than positional authority. Decisions made in this role shape multi‑year data investments, establish patterns adopted by multiple engineering teams, and directly affect Protective’s ability to deliver trusted data and AI capabilities at scale.

Scope and Level of Influence

• Individual contributor role with enterprise‑level impact; leads through influence, not through direct reporting relationships.
• Serves as the recognized design authority for assigned data domains and initiatives, with the standing to approve, challenge, or redirect solution designs.
• Operates with a high degree of autonomy on ambiguous, cross‑domain problems where requirements, ownership, and precedent are not yetestablished.
• Sets direction that is adopted by multiple delivery teams and persists well beyond the life of any single project.
• Escalates and resolves architectural disagreements across teams, bringing stakeholders to a defensible, documented decision.
• Trusted torepresentthe data organization in enterprise forums, executive conversations, and vendor or partner discussions.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership and Direction

• Set and communicate the technical direction for data solutions across assigned domains,establishingthe patterns, standards, and reference designs that other teams build against.
• Serve as design authority for significant data initiatives—reviewing, approving, and wherenecessarychallenging designs proposed by delivery teams.
• Drive alignment across teams with competing priorities, differing technical opinions, and separate reporting lines, building consensus wherepossibleand making clear recommendations where consensus is not reachable.
• Make and defend architectural decisions under uncertainty, documenting rationale, trade‑offs, and the conditions under which a decision should be revisited.
• Anticipate downstream technical and organizational consequences of designchoices, andproactively raise risks before they become delivery problems.
• Represent data architecture positions credibly to senior technology and business leadership.

Data and System Solution Design

• Design and implement end‑to‑end data solutions, including data warehouses, data lakes, and data pipelines, to support analytics, reporting, and AI initiatives.
• Define logical and physical data models that balance business usability with technical efficiency.
• Select and applyappropriate technologies(cloud platforms, database engines, orchestration tools) based onusecase, scale, and cost considerations.

Business and Technical Translation

• Partner with business stakeholders and leaders to understandobjectivesand translate them into clear technical requirements for data, reporting, and advanced analytics.
• Frame technicaloptionsas business decisions—articulating cost, risk, time‑to‑value, and long‑term implications so leaders can choose with confidence.
• Influence business stakeholders toward sustainable solutions, including the ability to constructively push back on requests that create long‑term cost, risk, or complexity.
• Ensure data solutions support accuracy, accessibility, governance, and regulatory compliance.
• Act as a design authority during delivery, ensuring solutions meet business intent whileremainingtechnically sound.

Data Integration and Enablement

• Design integration patterns to move and share data across systems using APIs, services, and pipelines.
• Enable downstream consumption by analytics, BI, and AI platforms through well‑structured, well‑documented data products.
• Reduce point‑to‑point integrations by promoting reusable, scalable data patterns and driving their adoption across teams.

Strategic Data Planning

• Shape and influence multi‑year data roadmaps that prioritize high‑value use cases while avoiding data redundancy and unmanaged “data swamps.”
• Partner with platform, governance, and enterprise architecture teams to align solution designs with enterprise standards and capabilities—and to evolve those standards where they no longer serve the business.
• Identifyopportunities to simplify,consolidate, or modernize existing data solutions, and build the business case needed to fund and sequence that work.
• Adviseleadership on build‑versus‑buy decisions, platformselection, and the architectural implications of strategic investments.

Security, Scalability, and Reliability

• Design secure data environments that follow Protective’s security, privacy, and access‑control policies.
• Ensure solutions scale to support increasing data volumes, complexity, and business demand.
• Incorporate resiliency, monitoring, and operational considerations into solution designs.

Mentorship and Capability Building

• Mentor data engineers and less experienced architects, raising the overall design and technical judgment of the data organization.
• Lead design reviews and architecture working sessions that develop others while improving outcomes.
• Create durable artifacts—reference architectures, design patterns, decision records, and documentation—that scale the architect’s judgment beyond their personal involvement.
• Contribute to hiring, technical assessment, and the development of the broader data community of practice.

Key Capabilities

Technical Depth

• Strong understanding of modern data architectures, including data lakes, data warehouses, and streaming or batch pipelines.
• Proven ability to design solutions that integrate data across multiple systems and domains.
• Ability to translate business problems into practical technical designs without over‑engineering.
• Working knowledge of cloud‑native architectures, data security principles, and scalable design patterns.
• Comfort operating in a delivery‑oriented environment alongside engineers, analysts, and product teams.

Leadership and