Senior Data Architect & Platform Leader

ZoomInfo Technologies LLC; United States; Remote; USD 172,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

ZoomInfo is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to define and evolve the architecture for our enterprise data platform. You will lead critical architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, governance, observability, and consumption, while mentoring engineers and elevating standards.

You will collaborate with data analysts, data scientists, software engineers, and product teams to build scalable, trustworthy data products.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 5+ years designing and operating large-scale data platforms, distributed data systems, or enterprise-grade data products.
• Demonstrated expertise in end-to-end system design, including defining requirements, evaluating tradeoffs, designing resilient architectures, and delivering production systems.
• Deep experience with modern data architecture concepts, such as lakehouse or warehouse platforms, batch and streaming processing, data modeling, orchestration, metadata management, and data governance.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language, such as Python, Java, Scala, or similar.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks and technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, or equivalent platforms.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling practices across analytical, operational, and domain-oriented use cases.
• Experience establishing engineering standards for testing, CI/CD, observability, infrastructure as code, reliability, and security.
• Proven ability to lead technical decisions across multiple teams without relying on direct authority.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and raising technical standards across an organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of data architecture for scalable, resilient data platforms and pipelines.
• Define end-to-end data systems spanning batch and streaming ingestion, transformation, modeling, storage, orchestration, and consumption.
• Document high-quality architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and RMF considerations across performance, reliability, and cost.
• Establish reusable architectural patterns for data engineering challenges like CDC, event-driven flows, schema evolution, and data quality.
• Set boundaries between operational systems, data platforms, analytics layers, and downstream apps.
• Lead design reviews and provide direction on implementation approaches across teams.
• Identify risks early and mitigate debt, single points of failure, data inconsistency, and fragility.
• Establish standards for data contracts, lineage, observability, freshness, and reconciliation.
• Champion security, privacy, governance, retention, and compliance throughout the data lifecycle.
• Develop guardrails to enable rapid delivery without sacrificing quality or reliability.
• Drive adoption of SLIs, SLOs, alerting, runbooks, and post-incident learning.

Skills

Data architecture

System design

Cloud data platforms

Leadership

Mentoring

Communication

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Flink

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Redshift

Job description

ZoomInfo is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to define and evolve the architecture for our enterprise data platform. You will lead critical architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, governance, observability, and consumption, while mentoring engineers and elevating standards.

You will collaborate with data analysts, data scientists, software engineers, and product teams to build scalable, trustworthy data products.