Senior BI and Data Architect

Viking Cruises; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with company match

Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP)

Annual discretionary bonus

15 paid vacation days

Highly subsidized gym membership

Job summary

Viking Cruises is looking for a Senior BI and Data Architect based in California. This key role will involve designing, building, and maintaining a robust analytical data platform aimed at improving decision-making across the business. The position also emphasizes end-to-end data stack skills, conversational analytics, and effective communication with stakeholders.

With a competitive salary range of $190,000 to $220,000 annually, employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits package, including medical and dental insurance, paid vacation days, and even discounts on cruises.

Qualifications

• Strong end-to-end BI experience with expertise in SQL.
• Advanced Python skills for data transformation workflows.
• Strong working knowledge of DAX for KPI development.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks and Unity Catalog.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain enterprise BI architectures.
• Build Power BI semantic models and advanced DAX measures.
• Work closely with business stakeholders to gather requirements.
• Ensure data quality and consistency across models.

Skills

SQL

Python

DAX

Power BI

Databricks

Data modeling

Data documentation

Tools

Synapse

Databricks Genie

Job description

Job Summary

Reporting to our Director, Customer Data and Identity Engineering, we are looking for a Senior BI and Data Architect with strong end-to-end data stack skills to design, build, and maintain the analytical data platform that powers reporting and decision-making across the business. Beyond traditional BI, this role will enable self-service, AI-powered conversational analytics – building the governed, well-documented semantic layer that lets business users ask questions in natural language and get trustworthy, consistent answers. This is a hybrid position based in our Woodland Hills, CA office. You will be required to adhere to our hybrid work policy, working from our office Monday and Thursday plus one additional weekday on a weekly basis.

Job Responsibilities

• End-to-end BI & data architecture and implementation
• Own BI solutions across the full data stack: data ingestion and transformation (Synapse, Databricks), analytical data models, and Power BI semantic models and reports.
• Design robust, scalable BI architectures aligned with enterprise standards.
• Act as a bridge between data engineering and business analytics, ensuring consistency and reusability across reporting tools and the conversational AI layer.
• Data modelling & analytics
• Design and maintain analytical data models (star/snowflake) optimized for reporting, performance, and natural-language querying—using clean, business-friendly naming and well-defined keys and relationships.
• Build and own Power BI semantic models with clean business definitions, reusable measures, and strong performance characteristics on Fabric capacity.
• Develop advanced DAX measures, including time intelligence, trend and variance analysis, and booking curves and demand patterns relevant to the hospitality industry.
• Conversational AI analytics & Databricks Genie enablement:
  • Design, build, and curate Databricks Genie for key business domains (e.g., bookings & demand, revenue management, operations) — selecting certified tables and metric views and authoring clear instructions, example SQL, and verified answers so business users receive trustworthy responses.
• Build and govern the Unity Catalog semantic layer (metric views) so core KPIs are defined once and reused consistently across Genie, AI/BI dashboards, and alerts.
• Make data AI/BI-ready: maintain rich table and column descriptions, a business glossary, and synonyms/entity matching so Genie reliably maps business language to the correct fields.
• Continuously evaluate and improve answer accuracy, reviewing generated SQL and refining instructions based on user feedback.
• Where valuable, extend conversational analytics into the flow of work by embedding Genie in Microsoft Teams, or applications via the Conversation API.
• Data engineering & transformations:
  • Develop data transformations using SQL and Python, and work with Databricks to prepare clean, well-modeled analytical datasets for both BI and conversational AI consumption.
  • Apply analytics-engineering best practices (layered models, clear data contracts, tested transformations).
• Business partnership & communication:
  • Work closely with business stakeholders (commercial, revenue, operations, leadership) to understand requirements, challenge assumptions, and translate needs into scalable BI and self-service analytics solutions.
  • Clearly communicate data definitions, model limitations, and trade-offs and design decisions.
  • Help drive data literacy and trust in BI outputs and AI-generated answers — including guidance on how to ask effective questions through prompt engineering and how to interpret results.
• Governance, quality & performance:
  • Ensure data quality and consistency across BI models and the AI layer.
  • Establish and enforce Unity Catalog metadata standards (table/column descriptions, tags, ownership, certification, lineage) and ensure Genie respects Unity Catalog permissions, row-level security, and column masking.
  • Optimize Power BI models for Fabric capacity usage (memory, refresh strategy, query performance).
  • Contribute to BI standards, best practices, and documentation.
  • Own a strategy around shared / certified semantic models and metric definitions that serve as the single source of truth across Power BI and Databricks Genie.

Job Requirements

• Strong end-to-end BI experience across data engineering, modeling, and reporting.
• SQL – Expert: Able to design, optimize, and troubleshoot complex analytical queries; deep understanding of joins, CTEs, window functions, aggregations, and performance tuning; comfortable validating AI-generated SQL.
• Python – Advanced: Experience building production-grade data transformation and analytics workflows using PySpark/Pandas; strong understanding of data quality, automation, testing, and scalable data processing in Databricks.
• DAX – Strong Working Knowledge: Able to develop complex measures and KPIs, including time intelligence, trend and variance analysis; understands evaluation context, filter propagation, and performance optimization within Power BI semantic models.
• Power BI: semantic model design, performance optimization, Fabric capacity awareness.
• Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog – hands‑on experience with catalogs, schemas, governance, lineage, and permissions.
• Dimensional / semantic data modeling with clean, business-friendly naming and well-defined keys and relationships (the foundation for reliable natural-language querying).
• Strong data-documentation discipline (descriptions, business glossary, certified definitions).
• Experience working with financial / accounting data.
• Proven ability to communicate effectively with business stakeholders.

What We Offer You

• Highly competitive compensation plan.
• Salary range $190,000 – $220,000 annually, determined by a myriad of factors including, but not limited to, years of experience, depth of experience, and other relevant business considerations.
• Employees are eligible for annual discretionary bonus.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP): Viking full‑time regular employees working in the United States can purchase Viking shares through payroll deductions.
• Full benefits including medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance at a highly subsidized rate (some plans are fully paid by Viking).
• Accrue 15 paid vacation days, sick time accrual by state, and 6 paid holidays per year.
• Opportunity to take a free and/or discounted cruise.
• Highly subsidized gym membership.
• Discounts on theatres, theme parks, movie tickets, travel discounts through IATA membership and too many more discounts to name.