Data Architect - 13+ years exp, Snowflake, dbt, Python

Meet the Team

Be part of the Cisco IT Data team, where technology, innovation, and collaboration drive real business value. Our team is at the forefront of designing and delivering scalable, secure, and advanced solutions that enable data-driven decision-making for Cisco's global business. We believe in a culture of curiosity, creativity, and continuous learning, where team members are empowered to experiment and bring new ideas to life.

As a Data Architect, you will be the senior technical authority responsible for defining the architecture, standards, and strategic direction of Cisco's enterprise data platforms. You will design scalable, secure, and future-ready data architectures that power advanced analytics, machine learning, and real-time data products. Partnering with engineering, analytics, and business leaders, your designs will directly shape how Cisco stores, governs, integrates, and unlocks value from data across the enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the enterprise data architecture vision, standards, and multi-year roadmap across ingestion, storage, transformation, discovery, and governance.
• Design scalable, secure, and highly available data architectures—including data lakes, lakehouses, data warehouses, and real-time streaming systems—leveraging modern cloud-native technologies.
• Define and lead target-state architecture and migration strategies that modernize legacy data infrastructure onto cloud-native platforms (e.g., GCP, Snowflake) to improve scalability and reduce operational cost.
• Establish architectural standards, reference patterns, and best practices for data modeling, integration, metadata management, and platform security across teams.
• Establish enterprise data modeling standards and governance/lineage frameworks that improve data quality, discoverability, and compliance across multiple business domains.
• Design API- and event-driven integration architectures that enable real-time data access across the enterprise, improving data delivery speed and reliability.
• Partner closely with data engineers, analytics teams, platform engineers, and business leaders to translate strategic priorities into robust, well-governed data solutions.
• Lead architecture decisions for platform modernization, evaluating and selecting technologies (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Airflow, DBT, Informatica, Kubernetes) to optimize efficiency, cost, and scale.
• Define data governance, lineage, quality, and compliance frameworks, ensuring they are embedded across platform design and operations.
• Provide architectural oversight and design reviews, ensuring solutions meet reliability, scalability, performance, and security requirements.
• Champion conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling practices that support both operational and analytical workloads.
• Mentor engineers and architects, fostering a culture of technical excellence, sound design thinking, and knowledge sharing.
• Act as a key technical advisor to leadership, influencing architecture decisions, technology investments, and strategic direction across the data organization.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 13+ years of professional experience in data architecture, data engineering, or large-scale data platform design.
• Deep expertise designing enterprise data architectures—data lakes, lakehouses, and data warehouses—at scale.
• Strong proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Snowflake) and modern, cloud-native data architectures.
• Expert-level data modeling skills (conceptual, logical, and physical) across relational, dimensional, and NoSQL paradigms.
• Proven experience defining data integration, ingestion, and API/microservices patterns for enterprise-scale systems.
• Strong knowledge of data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow, DBT, Informatica) and cloud-native storage (Snowflake, BigQuery).
• Hands-on understanding of CI/CD, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Solid programming or scripting skills (Python, SQL, Java, or similar) to support architecture validation and prototyping.
• Demonstrated success leading large, complex architecture initiatives and influencing across teams in Agile/Scrum environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing real-time/streaming data architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub) and large-scale ETL/ELT processes.
• Deep knowledge of data governance, security, lineage, and compliance frameworks.
• Experience architecting platforms to support AI/ML and advanced analytics workloads.
• Proven ability to optimize cost, performance, and scalability in cloud-based data environments at scale.
• Relevant architecture certifications (e.g., cloud architect, data architecture).
• Exceptional communication, influencing, stakeholder management, and mentorship abilities at the organizational level.

Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.