Senior Data Platform Architect

About Valcan IT Inc

Valcan IT Inc, a client of Dice, is actively seeking a Senior Data Platform Architect to join their team. This role focuses on accelerating the Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Role Summary

As a Senior Data Platform Architect, you will be a hands-on contract architect responsible for driving architecture and delivery across the Enterprise Data Platform, with a primary focus on the Enterprise Consumption Layer. This layer serves as the standardized analytics serving layer, delivering consumption-ready data products for Business Intelligence (BI) and emerging AI/data-agent use cases. You will operate at the intersection of architecture, prototyping, and pragmatic delivery, bringing a strong point of view, validating patterns through Proof of Concepts (POCs), and helping teams implement scalable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead rapid POCs and technical exploration to validate EDP and Enterprise Consumption Layer patterns (data modeling, performance/cost, security, operability).
• Define and evolve architecture patterns and reference implementations for building and maintaining the Enterprise Consumption Layer (enterprise-ready star schemas / dimensional models).
• Establish data product structure, onboarding standards, and lifecycle (naming, documentation, quality expectations).
• Develop BI and downstream access patterns, including guardrails for scalable consumption.
• Build hands-on prototypes on Google Cloud Platform when necessary, demonstrating implementation capability, not just design.
• Partner with architects, engineers, and product owners to design balanced solutions considering speed vs. durability, innovation vs. standardization, and incremental delivery vs. long-term platform fit.
• Contribute to practical enablement of data/AI agent use cases, such as data discovery, metadata-driven workflows, quality checks, and operational insights.
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, tradeoff decisions, documentation, and stakeholder communication.
• Operate within a Kanban/Agile model using Jira, delivering measurable outcomes iteratively.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of overall IT experience with significant hands-on delivery in modern data platforms.
• Strong experience building on Google Cloud Platform, including several of the following: BigQuery (modeling, optimization, cost/performance patterns), Dataform (or equivalent transformation framework), GCS, Cloud Composer, Cloud Functions/Cloud Run, IAM, and Logging/monitoring patterns (Cloud Logging/Monitoring).
• Demonstrated ability to work across architecture and implementation: defining a pattern, prototyping it, and guiding its adoption.
• Strong foundation in dimensional modeling / star schemas, metric definitions, and consumption-ready data structures.
• A robust data quality mindset, understanding what constitutes enterprise-ready data.
• Expertise in security and access design, including least privilege and domain/dataset-based access concepts.
• Strong communication skills, capable of explaining tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in retail, consumer, or omni-channel domains (customer, product, inventory, orders, pricing, promotions, loyalty).
• Familiarity with semantic layer concepts.
• Experience with data catalog / metadata platforms and governance workflows.
• Exposure to LLM-enabled/agentic tooling and automation patterns.
• Prior work in platform modernization or EDW migration programs.
• Experience defining enterprise standards (naming, dataset organization, data product onboarding, testing patterns).

Team & Culture Fit

• Collaborative, outcome-driven, and comfortable with ambiguity and early-stage exploration.
• Possess a bias toward action: prototype fast, document clearly, and scale what works.
• Exhibit strong ownership: identify gaps, propose options, drive alignment and closure.

Key skills/competency

• Data Platform Architecture
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• BigQuery
• Dimensional Modeling
• Data Modeling
• Enterprise Data Platform (EDP)
• Data Engineering
• Cloud Architecture
• Prototyping
• Technical Leadership