Data Architect, hybrid | 1067223

The Data Architect in this contract-to-hire role is the senior technical authority for client data. The Architect designs how membership, marketing, and sales data is modeled, integrated, governed, and delivered on the Data Store, a modern data platform built on Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Apache Iceberg, and AWS. The role turns the DS&E Data Strategy into working architecture: governed data products the business can use on its own, an AI-ready foundation, and a clean data path through the migration of the membership platform from netFORUM to Salesforce. This is a hands-on, delivery-oriented role that partners closely with engineering, analytics, Membership, Marketing, Education, Scientific Research and executive stakeholders across the client.

**Needs to be local as the position sits in their Columbus office. Also requires being onsite 2 days a week (Tuesday & Wednesday)

Top skills:

• Snowflake (must have)
• dbt
• Apache Airflow
• AWS

DS&E Data Strategy: What This Role Delivers Three Strategic Pillars

• Self-sufficient: business teams find and use trusted data and metrics without waiting on engineering
• Governed data products: certified, documented, owned Gold-layer data products with clear definitions and quality checks
• AI-ready: a semantic layer, ontology, and clean entity data that make AI and machine learning use cases dependable

12-Month Roadmap

• Months 0-3: establish data governance (ownership, definitions, stewardship, access policies) in parallel with the Snowflake platform implementation
• Platform path (phased hybrid): finish the current PostgreSQL migration, freeze new PostgreSQL builds, and stand up Snowflake in parallel, starting with a 60-day Snowflake proof-of-value on the Salesforce source
• Across the year: scale the medallion platform across sources and deliver priority data products to the business

Business Outcomes the Architecture Must Enable

• DS&E-Membership partnership aligned with the membership management system (MMS) modernization from netFORUM to Salesforce
• Insights Hub: centralized, trusted KPI reporting for business-unit leaders
• Predictive retention: churn triggers driven by the Member Engagement Score
• Hyper-personalization for early-career members across marketing channels, Data Architecture & Modeling
• Own the conceptual, logical, and physical data models for client data: members, customers, organizations, memberships, orders, subscriptions, events, learning, and engagement
• Design a unified Member/Customer 360 model, with entity resolution and deduplication that produce one trusted record across Membership, Marketing, Education, Scientific Research and commerce systems
• Extend the model for organizational and institutional accounts as the client expands from B2C into B2B selling
• Set modeling standards for each medallion layer (naming, keys, history and slowly changing dimensions, conformed dimensions) and review designs from the engineering team

Core Data Platform: Snowflake, Iceberg & AWS

• Own the SDS medallion architecture: Bronze as Parquet on Amazon S3, Silver as Apache Iceberg tables, and Gold as native Snowflake, using External, Iceberg, and Dynamic Tables where each fits
• Implement Snowflake Open Catalog (Polaris) as the near-term catalog for Iceberg metadata, with AWS Glue Data Catalog where needed
• Design Snowflake environments (dev, stage, prod), role hierarchy, RBAC, and AWS IAM Identity Center access patterns
• Own Snowflake performance and cost: warehouse sizing, resource monitors, clustering, query tuning, and credit reporting
• Lead the 60-day Snowflake proof-of-value on the Salesforce source and turn the results into reusable patterns for every other source

Pipelines & Transformation: Airflow, dbt & Talend

• Architect orchestration on Apache Airflow running on AWS ECS Fargate, with clear standards for DAG design, dependencies, retries, alerting, and SLAs
• Architect the dbt transformation layer that turns Silver data into Gold data products, with testing, documentation, lineage, and CI/CD through Git
• Govern the ingestion framework, standardized on Talend, across 16+ source systems, and decide when Snowflake-native options (Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks) or Airbyte are the better fit

Membership, Marketing & Scientific Research Data

• Serve as the domain expert for source systems: netFORUM (SQL Server), Salesforce, CDS, eRights/SSD (PostgreSQL), Adobe Commerce (Magento), C&EN, Docebo, Moodle, MAPS, GoToWebinar, LinkedIn Learning, and file-based feeds
• Integrate marketing applications, including Eloqua, HubSpot and CDP, so campaign, engagement, and audience data connects to member records and flows back out for activation
• Integrate sales applications, including Salesforce, Adobe Commerce, and contract and order systems, to support pipeline, quoting, revenue, and account reporting
• Re-platform integrations that feed netFORUM today, including Adobe Commerce organization and order data that flows through MuleSoft

netFORUM-to-Salesforce Migration

• Act as data lead for the membership platform migration: source-to-target mapping, data profiling and cleansing, migration sequencing, reconciliation, and cutover validation
• Design zero-ETL / zero-copy integration between Salesforce and Snowflake so Salesforce data reaches the SDS without custom pipelines
• Keep reporting and data products running through the transition by supporting netFORUM and Salesforce in parallel, then retiring netFORUM feeds cleanly

Data Governance & Quality

• Help stand up the DS&E data governance program in its first three months: data ownership, stewardship, business definitions, access policies, and certification of data products
• Implement governance in the platform with Snowflake Horizon (tagging, masking, row access, lineage) and an active metadata layer (Atlan, under evaluation)
• Define data quality rules and monitoring for critical member, customer, and revenue data

Data Products, AI & Analytics Enablement

• Design Gold-layer data products for the Member Engagement Score, churn and retention models, early-career personalization, and the COO leadership KPIs
• Build NL-to-SQL self-serve metric surfaces with Snowflake Cortex Analyst and a governed semantic/metric layer
• Design the AI-ready knowledge core: ontology layer (OWL/SKOS), Graph RAG search patterns, and ML use cases (churn, propensity, LTV) on Gold data

Stakeholder Solutions & Delivery

• Serve as the senior technical advisor to Membership, Marketing, Scientific Advancement, Awards & Fellows, and the COO office
• Produce architecture decision records (ADRs), solution designs, data mapping specifications, and roadmap artifacts for DS&E and CTO-level audiences
• Guide Analytical Engineers, Data Management Engineers, and onshore and offshore data engineers on standards and data product delivery
• Lead technology evaluations and recommend options that fit client data strategy and budget

Required Tech Stack Core Platform (Must Have) Snowflake · dbt · Apache Airflow · Apache Iceberg · AWS (S3, ECS Fargate, Glue, IAM Identity Center, RDS PostgreSQL) Catalogs & Governance Snowflake Open Catalog (Polaris) · Snowflake Horizon · AWS Glue Data Catalog · Atlan (under evaluation) Ingestion & Integration Talend · Snowpipe · Streams & Tasks · Airbyte · MuleSoft · Salesforce-Snowflake zero-copy Membership, Marketing & Sales Applications netFORUM · Salesforce · Eloqua · BlueConic CDP · Adobe Commerce (Magento) · Docebo · Moodle AI / Knowledge Layer Snowflake Cortex Analyst · Cortex AI functions · Amazon Neptune (RDF) · OWL / SKOS ontology · Graph RAG · Entity resolution Languages & Developer Tools SQL · Python · Git · GitHub Copilot · VS Code

• 8+ years of progressive experience in data architecture, data engineering, or solutions architecture, including 3+ years as the architect of record for a modern cloud data platform
• Deep hands-on experience with Snowflake in production: data modeling, RBAC, performance tuning, and cost management
• Production experience with dbt for transformation-layer design, testing, and documentation
• Production experience with Apache Airflow for orchestration at scale
• Experience designing and operating Apache Iceberg-based lakehouses on AWS (S3, Glue, IAM, container compute)
• Strong data modeling skills (dimensional, normalized, and entity-centric) and experience building a Customer or Member 360
• Experience with membership, association, or subscription data, and with marketing and sales application data (marketing automation, CDP, CRM, e-commerce)
• Hands-on experience with a CRM or membership-system migration, including data mapping, cleansing, reconciliation, and cutover; netFORUM-to-Salesforce strongly preferred
• Strong SQL and Python skills with a Git-based, code-first development workflow
• Proven ability to explain architecture and trade-offs to non-technical executives and business stakeholders
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or equivalent practical experience

Preferred

• SnowPro Advanced: Architect or SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer; dbt Analytics Engineering certification
• Experience with Eloqua, HubSpot, BlueConic or another CDP, Salesforce Data Cloud, or Adobe Commerce data
• Experience setting up a data governance program and implementing it in a catalog such as Atlan or Snowflake Horizon
• Experience with Snowflake Cortex, semantic/metric layers, or NL-to-SQL tooling
• Familiarity with AI and knowledge-layer technologies: Amazon Neptune, RDF/graph patterns, OWL/SKOS ontology design, or Graph RAG