Solution Architect

Responsibilities

Platform architecture & design

• Own the end-to-end architecture of a federated, multi-institution medallion lakehouse (Bronze / Silver / Gold) on Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric
• Define the federated, multi-tenant design that separates a centrally governed shared layer — shared transformation logic, a managed production catalog, and source-system security — from institution-administered catalogs and environments
• Establish reference architectures, design patterns, and technical standards that each institution’s engineering work follows
• Make and document key architecture and platform trade-off decisions, with clear rationale for technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Design ingestion and integration from Workday (HCM, Finance, Student) and legacy SIS, LMS, CRM, and identity sources into the lakehouse

Governance & security architecture

• Design the Unity Catalog security and access model across institutions, preserving institutional data autonomy within a shared governance framework
• Define and protect the two-catalog boundary — the institution-administered production catalog versus the centrally managed production catalog — and keep that distinction explicit across all designs
• Partner with governance leads to translate governance, data-quality, and stewardship policy into enforceable platform controls

Delivery enablement

• Provide hands-on design authority and technical guidance to data engineers, BI developers, DevOps, and data-quality and governance staff
• Review solution designs and key pull requests for architectural conformance
• Produce and maintain architecture documentation, decision records, and diagrams
• Support estimation, sequencing, and risk identification alongside the project and delivery leads

The responsibilities listed above are representative of the role and may be adjusted to meet organizational priorities.

Qualifications & Requirements

• 7–10 years designing and delivering cloud data platforms, including hands-on architecture of production analytics environments
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Azure Databricks and Unity Catalog — lakehouse design, medallion architecture, and catalog and security modeling
• Strong command of modern data-engineering patterns: ELT/ETL, orchestration, and data modeling across Bronze / Silver / Gold layers
• Proven ability to design multi-source integration (ERP / SIS / LMS / CRM / identity) into a governed analytics platform
• Experience defining security, access, and governance models in a shared or multi-team environment
• Comfort operating as a senior individual contributor — setting standards and guiding engineers without direct-report authority
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including architecture documentation and stakeholder-facing design reviews
• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting federated or multi-tenant data platforms that serve multiple institutions or business units — central to this role
• Microsoft Fabric and Power BI experience, including semantic models and workspace design
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert and/or Databricks certification
• Infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD familiarity (Terraform, DevOps pipelines) as it relates to platform design
• Exposure to data-quality tooling such as Great Expectations
• Experience in higher education and/or with Workday as a source system