Lead Enterprise Data Architect & Platform Lead

Steampunk; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 135,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

Steampunk is seeking an Enterprise Data Architect in the McLean, VA area to guide design, governance, and integration of enterprise data architectures across complex mission environments.

You will lead a team of Data Architects and Data Engineers, shaping models, semantic layers, and metadata while driving adoption of lakehouse, data mesh, and domain‑driven design for scalable pipelines and ML workloads.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a technical field.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of Data Architects and Data Engineers to design data models across analytics, AI/ML, and enterprise integration.
• Develop canonical data models, semantic layers, and domain schemas aligned with enterprise data strategies.
• Guide adoption of lakehouse, data mesh, data fabric, domain‑driven design, and event‑driven integration.
• Establish standards for data modeling, schema evolution, semantic consistency, and data contracts across teams.
• Partner with Data Eng, MLOps/LLMOps, and AI teams to ensure data architectures support scalable pipelines and ML workloads.
• Conduct architecture reviews ensuring alignment with reference architectures, security, performance, and modernization roadmaps.
• Lead integration strategy across platforms via APIs, streaming, CDC, virtualization, and metadata‑driven automation.
• Work with stakeholders to translate requirements into data structures for workflows and decision making.
• Mentor architects and engineers, elevating architectural thinking across the team.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and contribute to reusable artifacts and playbooks.
• Support pre‑sales by defining solution architectures and modernization strategies.
• Contribute to the growth of AI & Data Exploitation Practice.

Skills

Public trust clearance

Cross-functional leadership

Executive/Stakeholder communication

Mentoring

Architectural design

Lakehouse architecture

Data mesh patterns

Data fabric concepts

Metadata-driven design

Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)

ETL/ELT & streaming

API integration

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Data Architecture, or related technical field

Tools

ERWin

ER/Studio

dbt

Collibra

Alation

Atlan

Databricks

Spark

Kafka

Kinesis

Job description

Steampunk is seeking an Enterprise Data Architect in the McLean, VA area to guide design, governance, and integration of enterprise data architectures across complex mission environments.

You will lead a team of Data Architects and Data Engineers, shaping models, semantic layers, and metadata while driving adoption of lakehouse, data mesh, and domain‑driven design for scalable pipelines and ML workloads.