Senior Data & AI Architect - Hybrid (3x/Week)

WorkNovas LLC; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

WorkNovas LLC in Chicago seeks a Senior Data & AI Architect to lead the data architecture for AI initiatives, ensuring scalable data pipelines and secure governance.

You will own the end-to-end data strategy for AI projects, decide data residency, and orchestrate flows between systems while maintaining a full data lineage.

The role requires deep cloud platform experience (Snowflake, BigQuery), strong communication with executives, and a track record of building data lakehouse solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or enterprise data management.
• 3+ years designing data solutions for AI/ML workloads.
• Deep expertise with cloud data platforms, particularly Snowflake, Google BigQuery, or equivalent.
• Experience with enterprise data lake or data mesh architectures.
• Strong understanding of data modeling (dimensional, graph, document), ETL/ELT pipelines, and data integration patterns.
• Experience with data governance frameworks, data cataloging tools, and lineage tracking.
• Experience with AI/ML data requirements including feature engineering, vector embeddings, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and unstructured data processing.
• Proficiency in SQL; working knowledge of Python or similar scripting languages.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex data concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Design and govern the data architecture that underpins all AI/ML initiatives.
• Own the end-to-end data strategy for AI projects and determine where data resides and how it flows between systems.
• Maintain a comprehensive data lineage and usage inventory for visibility across the organization.

Skills

Snowflake

BigQuery

Data Modeling

ETL/ELT

SQL

Python

Governance

Data Lineage

AI/GenAI data

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Snowflake

BigQuery

Vertex AI

Cloud Storage

Pub/Sub

Dataflow

Data Lake / Lakehouse

Knowledge graph / Ontology

Job description

WorkNovas LLC in Chicago seeks a Senior Data & AI Architect to lead the data architecture for AI initiatives, ensuring scalable data pipelines and secure governance.

You will own the end-to-end data strategy for AI projects, decide data residency, and orchestrate flows between systems while maintaining a full data lineage.

The role requires deep cloud platform experience (Snowflake, BigQuery), strong communication with executives, and a track record of building data lakehouse solutions.