Snowflake Architect

What makes Cognizant a unique place to work? The combination of rapid growth and an international and innovative environment! This is creating a lot of opportunities for people like YOU — people with an entrepreneurial spirit who want to make a difference in this world. At Cognizant, together with your colleagues from all around the world, you will collaborate on creating solutions for the world's leading companies and help them become more flexible, more innovative and successful.

The role

The Snowflake Architect is responsible for designing, implementing, and administering Snowflake-based data solutions. This role combines architectural leadership with hands-on administration, ensuring scalable, secure, and high-performing data platforms that support business intelligence, analytics, and advanced data science initiatives.

Admin Responsibilities

• Configure and maintain Snowflake environments for optimal performance and reliability.
• Provide hands-on database administration and support.
• Implement monitoring, maintenance, and cost optimization best practices.
• Configure warehouses, databases, schemas, and resource monitors.
• Develop and implement incident management processes and resolve platform issues.
• Manage user access and roles, ensuring secure and appropriate data access.
• Enforce security policies including encryption and access controls.
• Automate routine administrative tasks using scripts and orchestration tools.
• Ensure scalability and high availability of the Snowflake platform.
• Schedule and manage backups, failover, and disaster recovery.
• Monitor and tune Snowflake performance, including warehouse sizing and query optimization and ensure efficient resource utilization and cost optimization.
• Troubleshoot issues related to queries, connections, and integrations.
• Manage external stages, storage integrations, data security, access controls, and role-based permissions in Snowflake
• Document processes, configurations, best practices, and technical solutions.

Architectural Responsibilities

• Hands-on experience with Snowflake and SQL, including query optimization.
• Knowledge of data warehousing and ETL/ELT (e.g. IDMC etc.).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience in data engineering or database development, particularly with data migrations.
• Participate in design discussions with architects, security teams, and development teams.
• Design and implement scalable Snowflake data architecture solutions. Ensure Snowflake solutions are secure, scalable, and resilient, following Snowflake solutions compliance standards.
• Define data models, schemas, and ETL/ELT pipelines for structured and semi-structured data.
• Optimize data storage, partitioning, and clustering strategies for performance and cost efficiency and establish best practices for data ingestion, transformation, and consumption.
• Collaborate with stakeholders including developers, DevOps, security, and business teams to align strategies.
• Establish governance and operational frameworks for usage, including cost management and resource optimization.
• Monitor and optimize performance, availability, and reliability.
• Mentor and guide technical teams on architecture principles and best practices.
• Align Snowflake usage with business goals and data strategy.
• Recommend improvements and upgrades based on new Snowflake features.

Technical Skills

• Deep understanding of Snowflake's unique architecture (separation of storage and compute) and features.
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake and SQL, including query optimization.
• Knowledge of data warehousing and ETL/ELT.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Snowflake integrations.
• Knowledge of DevOps and CI/CD practices for data pipelines and workflows
• Experience in data engineering or database development, particularly with data migrations.
• Strong expertise in Snowflake administration (user management, warehouses, roles, resource monitors, Replication and disaster recovery process).
• Knowledge of Snowflake features: Time Travel, Cloning, Micro-partitions, Streams & Tasks.
• Good understanding of private connectivity, network rules and policies, authentications etc
• Hands on experience in Snowflake features like external stages, snowpipe, storage integration, File Formats, RBAC etc
• Proficiency in Scripting skills in Python, Shell, or PowerShell for automating regular administrative or repeating task.
• Good understanding of various cost incurred in Snowflake.
• Experience with ETL processes and data integration workflows.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Snowflake Architect experience.
• Snowflake Certification (SnowPro Core or above).