Senior Data Architect

**Company overview**:
Blue Orange Digital is a boutique data & AI consultancy that delivers enterprise-grade results. We design and build modern data platforms, analytics, and ML/AI Agent solutions for mid‑market and enterprise clients across Private Equity, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Retail.
Our teams work with technologies like Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, and the broader Microsoft ecosystem to turn messy, real-world data into trustworthy, actionable insight.
We’re a builder‑led, client‑first culture that prizes ownership, clear communication, and shipping high‑impact work.
**Position overview**:
We are seeking a **Databricks Data Architect** who can **own Lakehouse design and governance**_and_** represent that vision in front of clients**. You’ll spend most of your time embedded with delivery squads—modeling data, tuning clusters and enforcing standards—but you’ll also step into discovery workshops, help scope solutions, and support pre-sales conversations when deep architectural insight is needed.
**Responsibilities**:
**Client Engagement & Solution Development**:
- Act as the primary technical liaison during key engagements—translating business goals into architecture that both sides understand.
- Lead discovery workshops and roadmap sessions to surface requirements, constraints and success metrics, then map them to scalable Databricks patterns.
- Partner with account & sales teams to shape estimates, reference architectures, and bill-of-materials for proposals and SOWs.
- Provide architecture-level answers for RFPs/RFIs and join pitch calls when deep Databricks credibility is essential.
- Mentor client technical leads during early project phases to ensure knowledge transfer and long-term success.
**Lakehouse Architecture & Design**:
- Design logical/physical models, storage layers and streaming/CDC patterns with Delta Lake and Unity Catalog.
- Architect multi-cloud Databricks solutions (AWS, Azure, GCP) covering ETL/ELT, structured streaming and governance zones.
**Governance & Security**:
- Define catalog/permission models, retention policies and lineage artifacts to meet HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR and similar frameworks.
- Implement row-/column-level security, tokenization and end-to-end audit logging.
**Performance & Cost Optimization**:
- Tune cluster sizing, Photon/SQL Warehouse configs, Z-Ordering and auto-compaction to hit SLA and cost targets.
- Instrument dashboards for query latency, job runtimes and spend.
**Implementation Leadership**:
- Lead design reviews, pair with engineers on PySpark/Scala, and sign off on pull-requests before production.
- Publish best-practice templates, Terraform workspace bootstraps and CI/CD guidelines.
**Cross-Functional Collaboration**:
- Work closely with Platform Ops, Security, Analytics and Product teams to translate requirements into production-ready data solutions.
- Host lunch-and-learns and brown-bag demos to level-up Databricks skill-sets across Blue Orange.
**Requirements**:
- **5-7 years** building cloud data platforms; **3+ years** hands-on with Databricks.
- Deep expertise in Delta Lake ACID, Unity Catalog and Spark performance tuning.
- Proven experience architecting Lakehouse or Cloud DW solutions on **two or more** major clouds.
- Strong SQL + PySpark/Scala; working knowledge of dbt, Airflow or similar orchestrators.
- Databricks **Data Engineer Professional** certification (or ability to earn in 90 days).
- Excellent communication skills for client workshops, documentation, and mentoring.
- Ability to engage with and communicate effectively with clients at all levels developing technical solutions that solve their challenges and/or advance their interests
- Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field, or equivalent experience.
- Ability to translate complex technical concepts into understandable terms; adept at engaging and influencing senior management and non-technical stakeholders
- Exceptional communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, particularly adept at conveying complex technical concepts effectively to non-technical audiences with ease
- Self-directed and motivated with a results-driven approach, capable of achieving deliveries and outcomes independently with limited external direction
- Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, IT, Data Science, or a related field
- Eager to learn and adapt in a rapidly evolving tech landscape
- Ability and willingness to travel as required to meet clients and attend industry events
**Preferred qualifications**:
- Experience as a Databricks Champion within your organization.
- Experience migrating legacy Hadoop/Snowflake/Redshift to Lakehouse.
- Familiarity with MLflow, Feature Store and Databricks Model Serving.
- DataOps/CI-CD for notebooks and IaC (Terraform, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions).
- Domain depth in one of our focus verticals (FinTech, Sports Analytics, Manufacturing, etc.).
- Experience with

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