Staff Data Architect

Warner Bros. Discovery; Burbank (CA); On-site; USD 146,440 - 271,960; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance coverage

Retirement savings plan

Annual bonuses and financial incentives

Job summary

Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking a Staff Data Architect to expand their enterprise data architecture, supporting AI-driven initiatives. The qualified candidate will focus on designing robust architectures, ensuring data quality, and working with advanced tools like Snowflake to deliver analytics solutions.

This role requires extensive experience in enterprise data architecture and proficiency in SQL, alongside a deep understanding of AI orchestration and semantic governance. Join us to shape the data future!

Qualifications

• 8+ years of enterprise data architecture experience.
• Minimum 3 years of advanced experience with Snowflake in enterprise data.
• Expert-level command of relational modeling and dimensional design.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the Context Layer across data products.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define data strategies and roadmaps.
• Design ETL/ELT processes for data integration.

Skills

Enterprise data architecture

Snowflake

Data modeling

SQL

AI orchestration

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Snowflake Semantic Views

Cortex AI

Snowflake Horizon

Job description

Your New Role

We are expanding our Enterprise Data & Analytics Group by adding a Staff Data Architect professional that will be a data‑driven leader with deep experience designing robust enterprise data architectures that support business objectives. This role will help advance the company’s modernization efforts on a cloud data platform, enabling a next-generation enterprise AI ecosystem that moves beyond basic chat interfaces and analytics workloads to support Agentic AI systems capable of autonomous reasoning.

To achieve this, the Staff Data Architect will work on bridging the gap between massive physical data layers and semantic business context.

The Staff Data Architect works closely with research, engineering, product management and other developers to design, build, and deploy data warehouse solutions and reporting tools that meet the growing AI and analytical needs of our organization.

Your Role Accountabilities

As a Data & Semantic Architect, you will design and implement the Context Layer across the data products. You will be responsible for creating canonical models in the Silver layer, defining enterprise ontologies, and native Semantic Views. Your work will ensure that autonomous AI agents have a rock‑solid, governed framework to accurately query, traverse, and reason against our data.

Data and Semantic Architecture

• Snowflake Lakehouse Architecture: Architect, build, and scale our Medallion data pipeline (Bronze‑to‑Silver‑to‑Gold) using Snowflake Dynamic Tables, Streams, and Tasks for optimized canonical processing.
• Canonical Modeling & Semantic Mapping: Build consolidated, clean entity tables (e.g., Unified Customer Identity, Orders) in the Silver layer from completely mismatched raw source data schemas.
• Snowflake Semantic Views Design: Design native Snowflake Semantic Views to establish the authoritative business definitions of entities, dimensions, facts, metrics, and relationships directly inside the warehouse.
• AI Grounding with Cortex: Configure and tune Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search by provisioning clean semantic models and relationship metadata, ensuring AI agents can achieve high accuracy on natural language queries without hallucinations.
• Ontology & Graph‑Native Modeling in SQL: Build PoCs to show lightweight ontology tracking and entity‑relationship traversing within Snowflake using advanced SQL techniques.
• Data Governance & Contracts: Leverage Snowflake Horizon capabilities to enforce column/row‑level security, data quality guardrails, and version‑controlled metric schemas so that updates to the semantic plane do not break downstream AI workflows.

Data Strategy & Governance

• Collaborate with stakeholders to define data strategies and roadmaps.
• Establish and maintain data governance frameworks to ensure data quality and compliance. Implement reusable data quality frameworks.
• Stay up to date with the latest cloud data technologies and trends.
• Evaluate and recommend new data technologies and tools.
• Develop best practices and well‑architected guidance to improve the quality, performance, and scalability of the solutions built on the Snowflake platform.
• Conduct exploratory and quantitative analytics, data mining, and discovery to change how we think, act, and utilize our data.
• Ensure data security and privacy through appropriate access controls and encryption.

Data Integration & Management

• Design ETL/ELT processes for data integration from various sources.
• Build software across our data platform, including event‑driven data processing, storage, and serving through scalable and highly available APIs.
• Optimize data storage and retrieval for efficient data access.

Collaboration & Communication

• Help us stay ahead of the curve by working closely with data engineers, stream processing specialists, API developers, our DevOps team, and analysts to design systems that can scale elastically.
• Work closely with business analysts and business users to understand data requirements.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior team members.
• Help build and maintain foundational data products such as Finance, Titles, Content Sales, Theatrical, Consumer Products, and others.
• Collaborate with data engineering, data platform, and data strategy teams to achieve organizational objectives.

Qualifications & Experiences

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or information technology or a similar major.
• 8+ years of enterprise data architecture experience with a proven track record of deploying large‑scale Snowflake ecosystems with a focus on domain modeling, AI orchestration, and semantic governance.
• Minimum 3 years of experience with advanced, hands‑on architectural experience with Snowflake in the enterprise data space is highly preferred. Experience in the competent tech stack is also preferred.
• Proven experience or deep working knowledge of Snowflake Semantic Views, Cortex AI (Analyst/Search), Snowflake Horizon, and Dynamic Tables.
• Data Modeling: Expert‑level command of relational modeling, dimensional (Kimball) design, and building canonical enterprise schemas.
• Advanced SQL & Processing: Mastery of complex SQL (including recursive CTEs, analytical window functions, and semi‑structured VARIANT parsing) alongside Snowpark (Python).
• AI Context Integration: Clear understanding of how LLM‑driven agents utilize structured enterprise data, APIs, and metadata catalogs to execute complex operational workflows.

Compensation

Pay Range: $146,440.00 - $271,960.00 per year. Other rewards may include annual bonuses, short‑ and long‑term incentives, and program‑specific awards. Additional benefits include health insurance coverage, an employee wellness program, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays, sick time, and vacation.

We are an equal‑opportunity employer. Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. Our consideration of qualified candidates is based on merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status, or any other category protected by law.

If you’re a qualified candidate with a disability and require accommodations during the job application and/or recruitment process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions to submit your request.

If you’re a qualified candidate with an arrest or conviction record, please know that your application will be considered in accordance with the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.