Lead Data Engineer, Snowflake Data Architect

Lead Data Engineer, Snowflake Data Architect

Location: Houston, TX | Type: Full Time | Setup: Hybrid, 3 days onsite | Experience: 7+ years

About the Role

We're hiring a Lead Data Engineer to own the architecture of a Snowflake platform being built from the ground up for a Trading Risk program. This is not a maintenance seat on someone else's stack. You'll set the standards the platform runs on, then stay hands-on in Snowflake proving them out.

The client is a global technology and management consultancy that partners with Tier 1 banks and large energy organizations on their hardest data problems. Delivery here runs in waves: each one ships a prioritized Trading Risk use case and leaves the platform stronger than it found it. That means the reusable pieces you design, the security model, the naming standards, the ingestion patterns, matter as much as any individual pipeline.

You'll be in the room with client teams, which means defending trade-offs live rather than handing off a diagram and walking away. If you like architecture work but have been stuck too far from the code, this role puts you back in both.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement data integration patterns that orchestrate ingestion, transformation, and publishing into trusted datasets for downstream analytics and risk reporting
• Build the Snowflake security model end to end: RBAC, roles, security groups, authorization, and access controls, and carry that into security reviews and platform risk mitigation
• Define scalable standards for environments, data domains, databases, objects, workspaces, files, and reporting naming conventions
• Tune Snowflake pipelines and workloads for performance, cost, and operational monitoring
• Guide development and operations teams on version control, CI/CD, and automated testing
• Partner with client and delivery teams on architecture best practices, implementation trade-offs, and what enterprise rollout will actually require
• Establish reusable platform capabilities so the next set of use cases and teams onboard without starting over

Qualifications

Core Data Architecture

• 7+ years in data engineering with meaningful time spent on enterprise data architecture, not just pipeline delivery
• Deep hands-on Snowflake: data modeling, performance optimization, access controls, and scalable warehouse and lakehouse patterns
• Track record building cloud-based analytics solutions where the platform capabilities were reused across teams
• Strong data governance and metadata management, including ontology and semantic modeling

Cloud and Domain

• Working knowledge of AWS across S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, EMR, and Redshift, plus broader cloud data architecture patterns
• Functional understanding of transactional data systems such as Trading or ERP platforms, and the ability to turn messy requirements into an architecture that holds
• Comfort explaining architecture decisions, options, and trade-offs to a room that includes both engineers and business stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Data platforms supporting Trading Risk, financial services, or similarly complex regulated environments
• Operational monitoring approaches for Snowflake storage, compute, performance, and cost
• Agile delivery experience where platform capability and business use cases ship in the same wave

Why Join Us

This is a flat, entrepreneurial consulting culture where the work goes to whoever can do it, not whoever has the title. The client base is Tier 1, the problems are genuinely hard, and there's real investment in continuous learning, training, and industry certifications. Benefits include medical, dental and vision, 401(k) match, parental leave and dependent care, tuition and wellness reimbursement, and HSA, FSA, and commuter options.

If you want your architecture decisions to survive contact with production rather than live in a slide deck, this is that kind of team.