Location: San Francisco, CA
Experience: 10+ years
Employment Type: Contract to Hire

About the Role:

NovaSoft is seeking a Lead Data Architect to drive the modernization of our enterprise data ecosystem. You will architect scalable, cloud-native solutions that power analytics, AI, and real-time insights across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve a cloud-native data platform supporting SQL and NoSQL workloads.
• Implement lakehouse, data mesh, and data fabric principles to enhance scalability and governance.
• Build architectures for analytics, real-time reporting, AI/ML pipelines, and feature stores.
• Define enterprise-wide data modeling standards and semantic layers.
• Strengthen governance, lineage, and data quality frameworks (GDPR, CCPA).
• Architect capabilities for personalization, recommendations, and graph-based insights.
• Evaluate emerging data technologies to support AI and data science use cases.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align business goals with technical strategy.
• Mentor engineers and lead strategic architectural initiatives.

Required Skills:

• 10+ years in data architecture, engineering, or platform design (3+ in a lead/architect role).
• Expertise in Snowflake, Databricks, Data Catalogs, and MDM/CDP solutions.
• Experience with BI/semantic tools (Looker, Tableau, etc.).
• Strong understanding of graph data models and recommendation engines.
• Proficiency with streaming tools (Kafka, Spark Streaming, Pub/Sub).
• Familiarity with AI/ML Ops pipelines and unstructured data integration.
• Deep knowledge of data governance, lineage, and compliance frameworks.
• Excellent leadership and communication skills.