Salary: USD65 - USD75 per hour
Our client is seeking a highly skilled Senior Data Engineer / Data Architect to assess, modernize, and optimize an enterprise data platform supporting critical business operations and analytics initiatives.
This position is ideal for a seasoned data professional who combines hands-on engineering expertise with architectural leadership. The successful candidate will evaluate existing data lake architecture, develop modernization strategies, implement governance best practices, and help drive the future state of a scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready data ecosystem.
You will collaborate with business stakeholders, technology teams, and leadership while serving as a technical mentor and trusted advisor on data architecture, governance, integration, analytics, and cloud data platform strategy.
Key Responsibilities
Data Architecture & Platform Strategy
- Assess and evaluate existing enterprise data lake architecture, including ingestion, transformation, storage, security, lineage, and reporting layers
- Develop target-state architecture recommendations and modernization roadmaps
- Design scalable solutions leveraging Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS Gen2), OneLake, and Power BI
- Recommend best practices for performance, scalability, governance, monitoring, and operational readiness
- Lead architectural reviews and present recommendations to technical and business stakeholders
- Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade ETL/ELT pipelines
- Build reliable and scalable data ingestion and transformation processes
- Support lakehouse, data warehouse, and semantic modeling initiatives
- Optimize data integration workflows, query performance, and data processing efficiency
- Develop trusted reporting datasets and analytics-ready data products
Data Governance & Quality
- Establish and maintain enterprise data governance frameworks
- Implement metadata management, data cataloging, lineage, and business glossary standards
- Define and enforce data quality controls, validation procedures, and monitoring processes
- Support data classification, sensitivity labeling, retention requirements, and audit readiness
- Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and governance policies
Analytics & Reporting Enablement
- Support Power BI semantic models, reporting architectures, and self-service analytics initiatives
- Collaborate with analysts and business teams to deliver trusted data solutions
- Improve data accessibility while maintaining governance and security standards
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- Serve as a technical leader for data engineering and architecture initiatives
- Provide mentoring, code reviews, and design guidance to engineers and BI professionals
- Develop standards, documentation, architecture diagrams, and operational runbooks
- Promote best practices across development, testing, deployment, and support processes
Preferred Technical Environment
Microsoft Data Platform
- Microsoft Fabric
- OneLake
- Power BI
- Power Automate
- Microsoft Purview
Data Engineering & Architecture
- Data Lakes & Lakehouse Architectures
- Enterprise Data Warehousing
- Dimensional Modeling
- Semantic Modeling
- Metadata Management
- Data Governance
- ETL/ELT Development
- Advanced SQL
- Data Quality & Reconciliation
DevOps & Platform Operations
- Git-Based Source Control
- Release Management
- Deployment Automation
- Monitoring & Alerting
- Rollback Planning
Additional Preferred Experience
- Snowflake Architecture & Administration
- Secure Data Sharing
- Query Performance Optimization
- Resource Monitoring & Cost Optimization
- Cloud Data Platform Evaluations
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, or related field
- 7+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Data Architecture, Business Intelligence Engineering, or Enterprise Data Platforms
- Strong experience with Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, ADLS Gen2, Power BI, Microsoft Purview, and Azure data services
- Expertise in enterprise data lake, lakehouse, and data warehouse architectures
- Advanced SQL development and performance tuning experience
- Experience designing and implementing enterprise data governance frameworks
- Strong understanding of metadata management, data lineage, cataloging, and data quality controls
- Experience leading architecture assessments, roadmap planning, and modernization initiatives
- Excellent troubleshooting, problem-solving, and documentation skills
- Strong communication skills with the ability to present complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience mentoring engineers, analysts, and technical teams
Preferred Qualifications
- Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer Associate
- Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate
- Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate
- Microsoft Purview or Data Governance certifications
- Azure Data Fundamentals or Security certifications
- Snowflake SnowPro certifications
- Experience comparing and evaluating Microsoft and Snowflake data platforms
- Knowledge of data privacy, governance, security, and compliance frameworks
- Experience in highly regulated enterprise environments
What Makes This Opportunity Attractive
- Lead enterprise-wide data architecture and modernization initiatives
- Significant influence over future-state data platform strategy
- Exposure to Microsoft Fabric and modern cloud analytics technologies
- Opportunity to establish governance standards and engineering best practices
- High visibility role partnering with business and technology leadership
- Collaborative environment with strong focus on innovation, scalability, and long-term data strategy