Principal Data Architect

Title: Principal Data Architect

Location: Dallas, Texas, United States

US Citizens only

About the Role

Rockwoods is hiring a senior-level Data Architect with deep hands-on experience designing and building modern cloud data platforms in real production environments.

This is not a strategy-only or documentation-heavy architecture role.

We are looking for someone who can own architecture decisions end-to-end while still being technically hands-on when needed someone who has actually built scalable platforms, solved performance problems, optimized costs, and handled messy enterprise data at scale.

The ideal candidate understands both architecture and execution.

You should be comfortable:

designing scalable data ecosystems

building production-grade pipelines

solving Snowflake performance challenges

enabling AI-ready data foundations

working directly with engineering teams to drive delivery

What You’ll Work On

Own end-to-end architecture across modern cloud data platforms

Design and build scalable ingestion, transformation, and data modeling frameworks

Lead Snowflake architecture including performance tuning, storage optimization, workload scaling, and cost management

Build API and event-driven ingestion frameworks for real-time and batch processing

Design reliable orchestration and pipeline monitoring strategies

Establish enterprise-grade governance, security, access controls, and data quality frameworks

Support AI/ML and advanced analytics initiatives through AI-ready data architecture

Help define modern engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and platform best practices

Strong Match If You Have

8–12+ years of Data Engineering / Data Architecture experience

Strong hands-on expertise with Python, Snowflake, SQL, and dbt

Experience building modern cloud-native data platforms from the ground up

Deep experience with data modeling, transformation strategies, orchestration, and pipeline scalability

Strong understanding of Snowflake optimization, compute/storage strategy, and query performance tuning

Experience with API-driven and event-driven architectures

Experience handling large-scale enterprise data environments

Ability to move between architecture discussions and hands-on technical execution comfortably

Strong communication and problem-solving skills in fast-moving environments

Big Plus

Experience supporting AI/ML or LLM-related data ecosystems

Experience with real-time streaming architectures

Financial services or regulated industry experience

Exposure to platform engineering or reusable data framework design

Experience with observability and data reliability tooling

What This Role Is NOT

This is NOT:

a support-only architect role

a governance-only role

a reporting/dashboard-focused position

a role for candidates with only POC/project exposure

an environment where architecture decisions stay on slides

We are looking for architects who build.

Why Engineers Like Working With Us

Modern cloud data initiatives

Strong technical ownership

Lean teams with direct impact

Fast-moving engineering environment

Minimal bureaucracy

Opportunity to influence platform direction and architecture standards

Leadership team that values execution and technical depth

Important

Please apply only if you have significant hands-on experience building and scaling production-grade modern data platforms.

Candidates with primarily support, maintenance, or documentation-heavy backgrounds will likely not be a fit.