Forward Deployed Architect

hightouch; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Hightouch seeks a data-architecture lead to define the data foundation for enterprise activation. You will architect schemas, guide a team of agents, and own data model performance across multi-channel campaigns.

You will align marketing outcomes with customer engagement, shaping the data platform and references for future engagements while collaborating with product teams to close gaps.

Qualifications

• Experience defining data architecture for marketing activation.
• Ability to profile data and derive activation-ready schemas.
• Strong understanding of identity matching across channels.

Responsibilities

• Run discovery with marketing and data teams to define activation use cases.
• Architect data solutions and lead agents to build the platform.
• Create target-state schemas and identity matching rules.
• Direct the build, review deliverables, and own model performance.
• Define success metrics and defend results to executives.
• Produce reference architectures for future engagements.
• Develop semantic layer, metrics, and business logic for plain-language queries.
• Collaborate with product teams to surface gaps.

Skills

SQL Fluency

Data Architecture

Identity Matching

Client Engagement

Tools

SQL

Job description

About Hightouch

Hightouch is an Agentic Marketing Platform powered by the industry-leading Composable CDP. With complete brand context, customer data, and performance history in one place, every marketer finally has the power to build and ship end-to-end campaigns themselves. Teams move faster, stay on brand, and get AI marketing that actually works.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, Hightouch enables marketing teams to analyze performance, brainstorm ideas, and generate creative at a speed and quality that wasn't previously possible.

Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, Hightouch is trusted by leading enterprises like Domino's, Spotify, Aritzia, Cars.com, Ramp, and PetSmart.

At Hightouch, our mission is to help our customers leverage data and AI to grow their businesses. The team is ambitious, impact-driven, efficient — and we believe humility, kindness, and compassion are essential to our success. If you're energized by velocity, obsessed with raising the bar, and want to build alongside people who care deeply about each other and our customers, we'd love to meet you.

About the Role

Our agents build audiences, run journeys and activate campaigns in the time it used to take a marketer to file a ticket. Those agents rely on a solid data foundation and set of context, which is what this role is for. You go into our most complex enterprise customers and set the vision for their architecture, deploy a team of agents to build it, and you catch and solve any quality issues along the way.

You'll work with a small number of enterprise customers to figure out what they need, champion a specific implementation plan, and build it yourself or in conjunction with the customer's team. You'll define what success looks like, and you'll be the one who proves the job is done. This is a new role on a team we're building now. You'll be one of the first people in it, which means you'll shape how it works — the playbooks, the standards, what we take on and what we hand back.

Our platform does the heavy lifting. You drive the vision for the data architecture and have the judgment to dive into the details when the details are what matter. The best candidates are fluent in marketing outcomes and customer engagement, with real depth in data.

What You'll Do

• Establish what the customer is trying to do. Run discovery with marketing and data teams and get from "we want better targeting" to specific activation use cases.
• Profile and understand the data, with agents doing the first pass and you deciding what it actually means, so you can architect a solution that closes data gaps at the customer and lands them with a working Hightouch configuration
• Create target-state schemas and identity matching rules that make a customer’s data activation-ready
• Deeply understand how the customer targets and at what grain — e.g., person, household, device — and design identity matching rules to support it
• Direct the build. Put agents to work profiling the warehouse, proposing models and generating transformations. Review everything they produce, rewrite what they get wrong, and own the models and their performance regardless of who or what typed them.
• Define the number that proves it worked, agree it with the customer before the build starts, compute it, and defend it to senior leaders
• Hand off the day-to-day but stay the architect. You remain the named person they and their account manager come back to when the data model changes, new sources land, or their identity graph needs rework. You produce reference architectures the next engagement can reuse
• Build the context our agents run on. The semantic layer, metric definitions and business logic you encode are what let a marketer at a Fortune 500 ask a question in plain language and get an answer worth acting on. Bad context is worse than no context, and it's yours
• Be the eyes and ears for our product teams. You'll see our gaps before anyone else does - bring them back sharp enough to act on

About you

• You direct agents, you don't just prompt them. You'll point them at warehouses with undocumented tables and no reliable dictionary, and you'll be the last judgment before what they build ships to millions of people. You reach for an agent before a blank editor, but you scrutinize every line before it goes out.
• SQL Fluency. Anyone can generate a thousand