Forward Deployed Architect

Hightouch; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Hightouch in San Francisco is seeking an experienced Enterprise Solutions Architect to lead data architecture for our largest customers. You will translate marketing goals into scalable data models, identity graphs, and activation strategies, guiding a team of agents and collaborating with customer teams.

You will own the design of target-state schemas, surface data gaps, and ensure implementations meet performance, cost, and reliability targets.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role.
• Deep knowledge of SQL and cloud data warehouses (Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks).
• Experience designing data architectures for large enterprises and CDP-like platforms.

Responsibilities

• Establish discovery with marketing and data teams to translate goals into concrete activation use cases.
• Profile and interpret data to architect solutions that close data gaps and land a working Hightouch configuration.
• Create target-state schemas and identity matching rules for activation-ready data.
• Deeply understand how customers target and design identity matching rules accordingly.
• Direct the build: oversee profiling, modeling, and transformations; review outputs and own performance.

Skills

SQL Fluency

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Stakeholder Management

Data Architecture

Tools

dbt

SQLMesh

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.

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 lines of SQL now. You're hired because you can read them and find the join that's wrong. Fluent in Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery, with query performance and warehouse cost as things you think about unprompted.
• You're a driver. You've parachuted into messy engagements with dozens of stakeholders who have differing opinions and driven discovery, clarity, and alignment.
• 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role — analytics engineering, solutions architecture, forward-deployed engineering, data consulting, or in-house marketing data work at a large brand.
• This is an agent-native role. The work is data architecture. The leverage is AI. If your instinct is that doing it by hand would be faster, this will be the wrong seat.

Bonus Points

• dbt, SQLMesh or similar transformation tooling; git-native, PR-driven workflow.
• Prior work with identity resolution, CDPs or MDM