Sr. Consultant, Data Architect
International Business Machines Corporation
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Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
IBM Consulting seeks a Sr. Consultant, Data Architect to lead enterprise data platform design using Snowflake and Databricks across AWS, Azure, and GCP. You will guide discovery, modeling, ingestion patterns, and governance while mentoring engineers and delivering AI-ready data solutions.
This role can be performed from anywhere in the US, with strong client engagement and software leadership. You will shape data strategy, ensure security and cost efficiency, and collaborate with teams to
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.
- 8+ years in data engineering, warehousing, or solution architecture with 2+ years as lead architect.
- Client-facing consulting or professional services delivery experience including discovery and design sessions.
- 3+ years hands-on with a modern cloud data platform (Snowflake or Databricks).
Responsibilities
- Lead discovery sessions to translate business goals into a production-ready data platform architecture.
- Design platform topology, security, governance, and cost/performance architecture.
- Model layered data structures and semantic layers for BI, applications, and AI.
- Select and document integration patterns (CDC, batch, event-driven, API).
- Lead model design and CI/CD standards; establish coding practices and peer reviews.
- Architect cloud integrations including storage, IAM, networking, secrets management.
- Evaluate platform-native AI capabilities and design data foundations for AI/ML workloads.
- Own technical delivery from design to production; monitor SLAs and costs.
- Serve as the primary technical contact for client executives; surface risks and propose resolutions.
- Mentor engineers and contribute reusable accelerators and patterns.
- Use AI-assisted tooling to improve design and delivery throughput.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You'll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their hybrid cloud and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Red Hat, you'll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success. You'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.
Hakkoda, an IBM company, is a modern data and AI consultancy. Our mission is to push the boundaries of data and AI, to be the partner clients trust for their most complex data challenges, and to create the kind of company that people want to be a part of. We bring deep expertise to Snowflake and the broader modern data stack, we are easy to work with, and we turn repeat problems into reusable solutions. Our team is distributed across North America, Latin America, and Europe, and we hire curious people who want to learn, experiment, and lead.
We are looking for a Sr. Consultant, Data Architectto join our growing team of experts. This position owns the technical architecture of client engagements on modern cloud data platforms, with Snowflake and Databricks and cloud-native services on AWS, Azure, and GCP alongside it. The work spans target-state platform design, data modeling, ingestion and transformation patterns, security and governance design, and the engineering standards that keep delivery consistent from first design through production.
The ideal candidate is as comfortable whiteboarding an architecture as they are rolling up their sleeves in delivery. They have designed and delivered enterprise data platforms end to end, lead discovery with clients to turn business goals into technical requirements, and make and document the trade-offs behind every design decision. They incorporate AI tooling into how they work and deliver, can advise clients on where AI fits in their data strategy, and architect platforms that support AI and analytics workloads while keeping foundational data quality, structure, and governance intact.
This role carries technical leadership on an engagement. The Solution Architect is accountable for the technical outcome: the architecture is sound, the team builds to it, and what ships to the client meets the design. They serve as the primary technical point of contact for client stakeholders, set technical direction for the delivery team, run design and code reviews, and mentor engineers at earlier stages of their careers. This person thrives in a consulting environment where no two engagements are the same.
This role can be performed from anywhere in the US.
- Discovery and Solution Design:Lead discovery sessions with client stakeholders to clarify business goals, technical requirements, and constraints, and translate them into a production-ready data platform architecture with a phased delivery plan.
- Platform Architecture:Design platform topology, environment strategy, security and governance model (role-based access, masking, row-level policies, tagging), and cost and performance architecture for the engagement's platform.
- Data Modeling:Design layered data models (medallion, dimensional, Data Vault) and semantic layers that serve BI, application, and AI consumption.
- Integration and Pipeline Patterns:Select integration patterns (batch, CDC, event-driven, file-based, API, data sharing) against client constraints, and document the trade-offs in architecture decision records.
- Transformation and Engineering Standards:Lead model design, materialization strategy, testing, and documentation in dbt or an equivalent framework; establish CI/CD, coding standards, and peer review for the team.
- Cloud Integration:Architect integrations between the data platform and cloud services, including object storage, IAM, networking and private connectivity, secrets management, and managed processing services.
- Platform-Native and AI Capabilities:Evaluate and adopt platform-native capabilities where they fit the client's roadmap (for example Snowflake Cortex, Snowpark, Iceberg and open table formats, Databricks Unity Catalog), and design the data foundations that AI and ML workloads depend on.
- Delivery Ownership:Own technical delivery to production: decompose the architecture into workstreams, review what the team builds against it, monitor pipeline SLAs and platform cost, and lead root-cause analysis for data incidents.
- Client Engagement:Serve as the primary technical point of contact for client stakeholders and executives; lead design sessions and technical status reporting; surface risks, blockers, and scope changes early with proposed resolutions.
- Team Leadership and Mentorship:Set technical direction for data engineers and analytics engineers on the engagement, run design and code reviews, and develop teammates through pairing and structured feedback.
- Practice Contribution:Contribute reusable accelerators, patterns, and enablement content back to the practice, and support solutioning and estimation for new work.
- AI-Assisted Delivery:Use AI-assisted engineering tooling in design and delivery work and set standards for its use within the team.
This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.
Bachelor's Degree
Master's Degree
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent field.
- 8+ years in data engineering, data warehousing, or solution architecture, including 2+ years as the lead architect on enterprise data platform engagements.
- Client-facing consulting or professional services delivery experience, including leading discovery and design sessions with technical and business stakeholders.
- 3+ years hands-on on at least one modern cloud data platform: Snowflake (warehouse topology, clustering and performance, RBAC and security model, Streams, Tasks, Dynamic Tables, data sharing) or Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark, Workflows).
- Enterprise data modeling across medallion, dimensional, and Data Vault or 3NF approaches, and target-state platform design across ingestion, transformation, semantic, and consumption layers.
- Proven track record designing batch and streaming ingestion frameworks and choosing among integration patterns (CDC, event-driven, file-based, API) based on client constraints.
- Strong proficiency in SQL and Python; hands-on with ELT and orchestration tooling such as dbt, Matillion, Informatica, Airflow, or platform-native pipelines.
- CI/CD for data platforms (GitLab, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps): pipelines, merge request workflows, environment promotion, and automated testing.
- Cloud platform experience on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including storage, IAM, networking and private connectivity, secrets management, and cost considerations for data platforms.
- Experience designing platforms that support AI and ML workloads, including feature and vector data and LLM integration within data pipelines.
- Demonstrated technical leadership: setting technical direction, conducting design and code reviews, and mentoring engineers at earlier career stages.
- Strong client-facing communication skills, including presenting and defending architecture decisions to technical and executive stakeholders.
- Practical use of AI-assisted development tooling to improve design and delivery throughput.
- Comfortable working in Agile delivery environments.
- Platform Certifications:SnowPro Advanced: Architect or Data Engineer; Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional or equivalent.
- Multi-Platform Architecture:Experience on both Snowflake and Databricks, including coexistence or migration architectures, and with Apache Iceberg or other open table formats.
- Cloud Architecture Certification:AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or GCP Professional Data Engineer.
- DevOps for Data:Infrastructure as code (Terraform), environment strategy, and observability and monitoring for data platforms.
- Platform Migration:Experience migrating legacy warehouses (Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server, Hadoop) to cloud platforms, including assessment, wave planning, and validation.
- Data Governance and Security Architecture:Governance frameworks, data quality controls, lineage, and cataloging (Alation, Atlan, Collibra, or equivalent).
- Streaming and Event-Driven Patterns:Kafka, Kinesis, EventBridge, or Event Hubs for operational and analytic data movement.
- Applied AI in Production:Exposure to MLOps practices, model serving, RAG and agentic data patterns, and Snowflake Cortex or Databricks Mosaic AI.
- Industry Context:Regulated industry experience (financial services, insurance, healthcare and life sciences, energy, public sector).
- Solutioning and Pre-Sales Support:Contributing architecture, estimates, and technical narrative to proposals and statements of work.
IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration. We believe in the power of technology responsibly used to help people, partners and the planet.
In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.
Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.
Are you ready to be an IBMer?
IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.
Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.
At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.
IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:
- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs
- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals
- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.
IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Country
United States
Work arrangement
Hybrid
Area of work
Software Engineering
Employment type
Regular
Contract type
Regular
Projected Minimum Salary per year
117,000.00
Projected Maximum Salary per year
219,000.00
Position type
Professional
Up to 60% or 3 days a week (home on weekends - based on project requirements)
Company
(0147) International Business Machines Corporation
Shift
General (daytime)
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