Data Architect | Contract | Hybrid in Los Angeles

The Role:
We are seeking a senior Data Architect, for a project based assignment, with deep experience designing and building scalable enterprise data foundations.This role will focus on defining the architecture, standards, and roadmap needed to make data trusted, governed, secure, accessible, and ready to support analytics, digital products, and emerging AI use cases.
The ideal candidate has strong experience across enterprise data platforms, data modeling, governance, integration, quality, metadata, lineage, and cloud architecture. Experience supporting generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic AI initiatives is helpful, but the primary focus of this role is strong data architecture and platform foundations. This is a contract role based in Los Angeles with an onsite expectation of three days per week.

What you'll do:

• Define current-state and future-state data architecture across enterprise platforms and applications.
• Design scalable data foundations across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Establish standards across data ingestion, storage, transformation, modeling, metadata, lineage, quality, and governance.
• Create architecture patterns for batch, streaming, event-driven, and API-based data integration.
• Develop conceptual, logical, and physical data models aligned with business and technical requirements.
• Assess existing data platforms and identify gaps across scalability, quality, governance, integration, security, and accessibility.
• Partner with engineering, product, analytics, security, and business teams to ensure enterprise data is trusted, usable, and properly governed.
• Support data architectures that enable analytics, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, and other emerging technology use cases.
• Evaluate data platforms, tools, and technologies based on scalability, security, maintainability, and business needs.
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear recommendations, roadmaps, and architecture documentation for technical and executive stakeholders.

Required Skills:

• 8+ years of experience in data architecture, enterprise data platforms, data engineering, or a related field.
• Demonstrated experience designing or building scalable enterprise data foundations.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, integration architecture, metadata, lineage, governance, data quality, and master data management.
• Experience with modern data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Synapse, or comparable technologies.
• Experience architecting data solutions in AWS, Azure, GCP, or hybrid cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of data lakes, lakehouses, data warehouses, and modern data platform architecture.
• Experience designing batch, streaming, event-driven, and API-based data architectures.
• Strong understanding of data security, privacy, access control, and responsible data usage.
• Ability to assess complex environments and translate findings into practical architecture and implementation roadmaps.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Must be based in the Los Angeles area and able to work onsite three days per week.

Nice-to-have Skills:

• Experience supporting generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic AI initiatives.
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, semantic layers, knowledge graphs, or similar technologies.
• Experience with data products, data contracts, semantic modeling, or domain-oriented architecture.
• Experience leading data platform modernization or enterprise architecture initiatives.
• Consulting or client-facing experience.

Education & Certifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or relevant years of work experience

Location:

• Los Angeles, California, United States  3x onsite

*Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time