Director, Data Architecture & Engineering

3Cloud is a company that values experimentation and teamwork, seeking a Director of Data Architecture & Engineering. This role involves leading multiple teams, defining architecture frameworks, and guiding multi-team execution to ensure alignment with business goals and cloud modernization initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Maintain a clear view of each team member's delivery commitments, growth plans, and internal contributions
• Develop and grow team members through regular coaching, clear expectations, and constructive feedback. Build a culture of trust, inclusion, and collaboration
• Monitor team health, morale, and workload balance, acting early to address engagement or performance concerns in partnership with practice leadership
• Maintain regular one-to-one connections with each team member, provide clear feedback, and help them remove blockers related to client work, pursuits, or internal initiatives
• Oversee staffing and resource alignment across teams, balancing utilization, development goals, client needs, and sustainable workloads
• Communicate practice priorities and organizational objectives clearly, ensuring teams understand how their work contributes to broader organizational goals
• Define interview standards and mentorship strategies, training others to apply them consistently and improving hiring outcomes and talent growth at scale
• Create and maintain development plans for team members, including stretch assignments, shadowing, certifications, and opportunities for external visibility
• Lead or support performance reviews, promotion recommendations, and compensation input for your teams, using consistent standards that reflect both impact and behavior
• Represent your teams in leadership forums, communicate expectations and decisions clearly back to the group, and bring forward patterns, risks, and successes that should shape practice strategy
• Lead architecture and technical strategy for large Azure programs and portfolios so solutions meet client goals for value, security, scalability, reliability, performance, and cost
• Define modernization blueprints and reference architectures across applications, platforms, and data, including system and subsystem designs, patterns, and standards that simplify delivery and operations over time
• Translate business and product strategy into cloud architecture roadmaps and execution plans that drive measurable outcomes and adapt based on production feedback and telemetry
• Guide major architecture decisions across programs, promote shared design standards and reusable models, and resolve high-impact technical trade-offs
• Work across teams to connect solutions into cohesive end-to-end architectures with clear ownership boundaries and integration contracts
• Provide architectural oversight during delivery through design reviews, forums, and governance, keeping cross-cutting concerns (security, performance, resilience, availability, compliance, observability, and cost) aligned across teams
• Promote modular design, clear boundaries, testability, CI/CD, and observability so non-functional requirements are treated as first-class and systems remain reliable and maintainable
• Use AI tools to accelerate discovery, design, code, tests, documentation, and analysis, and scale successful practices so teams adopt them consistently
• Define and own enterprise data platform strategy centered on Databricks or equivalent lakehouse architectures
• Establish reference architectures spanning ingestion, lakehouse, analytics, and AI/ML
• Set standards and best practices for: Databricks lakehouse design and workload isolation
• Delta Lake optimization and data lifecycle management
• Streaming and batch processing patterns
• Unity Catalog–aligned governance and security models
• Guide multi-workspace and multi-region Databricks deployments
• Ensure tight integration between Databricks, Azure-native services, and downstream analytics tools
• Oversee architectural alignment with complementary platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Fabric, Power BI)
• Lead or co-lead executive and senior stakeholder conversations on cloud modernization, platform strategy, AI adoption, and program roadmaps
• Use structured problem solving to clarify scope, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs, and shape delivery plans that balance value, cost, speed, and long-term system health
• Set discovery strategy so program objectives flow into a clear, traceable backlog tied to architecture and business outcomes
• Explain complex architecture and modernization strategies in clear language for executives, business leaders, and technical teams, including options, trade-offs, and recommendations
• Build trusted relationships with technology and business leaders, influencing priorities and investment decisions in ways that help mature their engineering and architecture practices
• Run structured decision-making forums (such as architecture reviews or steering committees) that produce clear decisions, documented rationale, and actionable next steps
• Define architecture, discovery, and delivery frameworks and working agreements that support predictable, incremental delivery across multiple teams and time zones, including cadences, artifacts, escalation paths, and hybrid delivery guidelines
• Align teams on shared outcomes, APIs, integration contracts, and operating models, ensuring crossteam dependencies are identified early, owned, and tracked through to completion
• Support effective use of Agile methods at program scale so architecture, backlogs, and release plans support meaningful increments, stable team velocity, low defect escape, clear definitions of done, and course corrections based on telemetry and feedback
• Track risks, technical debt, quality trends, and architectural drift across teams, and recommend adjustments that keep programs on track while balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term system health
• Support cross-practice opportunity qualification and estimating using playbooks, benchmarks, and templates so the organization focuses on high-fit pursuits and improves proposal quality and confidence in value, risk, and margin
• Mentor Senior Architects, Delivery Architects, and senior engineers, helping them grow systems thinking, architectural judgment, cross-team awareness, and their ability to lead multi-team initiatives
• Provide architectural oversight across programs, modeling pragmatic decision-making, including when to keep solutions simple, when to standardize, when to extend patterns, and when to introduce new technologies
• Help shape career paths and development plans for architects by clarifying expectations for operating at program scale and providing concrete examples of what “good” looks like
• Create and maintain high-leverage learning assets—such as reference implementations, architecture decision records, playbooks, and mentoring guides—that accelerate onboarding and skill growth
• Support hiring, calibration, and talent development by defining interview standards, participating in senior-level interviews and promotion reviews, and training others to apply those standards consistently
• Set a high bar for executive-ready communication and storytelling, and coach others so their narratives support clear decisions and strengthen client trust
• Help build a culture of psychological safety, inclusion, constructive feedback, and continuous improvement within and across teams, and support new ways of working that endure beyond a single project
• Grow the company by identifying opportunities within your accounts across all our capabilities and pursuing them with the support of the account team
• Intentionally build executive relationships within accounts to expand our partnership and create opportunities to provide strategic value
• Drive sales opportunities by participating in pursuit teams as either the Pursuit Lead or Technical Solution Lead
• Partner with sales, account, and practice leaders to shape technical strategy for strategic pursuits, projects and/or programs
• Lead the creation of solution options, program-level architectures, and estimates, clearly documenting assumptions, dependencies, and risks and explaining how proposed approaches drive business value and reduce risk
• Operate as a senior technical advisor whose guidance shapes multi-track initiatives and supports long-term account growth
• Identify follow-on and adjacent opportunities—such as platform extensions, additional modernization waves, AI-enabled capabilities, or data estate modernization—that align with client strategies and 3Cloud’s strengths
• Define and evolve reusable assets—such as reference architectures, modernization playbooks, landing zone templates, workshops, accelerators, and starter repositories—that become standard patterns for delivery teams and reduce cycle time and rework while honoring architectural and nonfunctional requirements
• Champion adoption of modern frameworks, cloud platform capabilities, automation practices, and AIassisted tools in a responsible and secure way, using pilots and experiments with clear success criteria to turn innovation into stable, repeatable practice
• Contribute to internal cross-practice initiatives that share patterns and lessons from large programs and reinforce our credibility with clients and partners
• Shape enablement programs that grow capabilities and reusable assets across accounts and package applied innovation into offerings and assets used in delivery and pursuits

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field preferred
• 12+ years of experience delivering solutions in a primary domain such as application development, cloud platform engineering, DevOps, or data and analytics, including significant work at enterprise scale
• 7+ years of experience in solution architecture and leading development or engineering teams, including multi-team or multi-workstream efforts at program scale
• 10+ years of experience in data platforms, data engineering, or consulting
• Deep architectural expertise with Databricks, including Spark optimization, Delta Lake, and workload design
• Strong understanding of Azure-native data services and cloud architecture
• Proven experience in architecting and implementing solutions using Microsoft technologies
• Proven experience leading architecture and delivery for Azure-based modernization, transformation, AI, or platform programs at enterprise scale
• Experience defining solution and platform architectures that connect business strategy with scalable technical design, strong delivery practices, and measurable outcomes
• Experience leading hybrid and remote teams and working with multiple stakeholders across time zones while maintaining alignment, quality, and predictable delivery
• Deep understanding of core concepts, languages, frameworks, and design patterns in a primary domain, with the ability to apply them at system and program scale
• Experience designing and integrating quality, automation, and observability practices at scale, including automated testing strategies and embedding quality checks into delivery workflows
• Experience using AI-augmented development and integrating AI and machine learning capabilities into solutions (for example, using APIs, frameworks, or cloud-based AI services and tools for code, test, and documentation acceleration)
• Significant experience working in Agile or Scrum environments at scale, including backlog structuring, dependency management, integration planning, and release management
• Proven success in consulting or professional services, including client-facing leadership and executive engagement
• Familiarity with key Azure services used in modern solutions that are relevant to your domain (for example, messaging, compute, data, security, networking, management, and integration services)
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with strong presentation, written, and verbal communication skills for both technical and business audiences
• Commitment to continuous learning in cloud, data, and AI, with the ability to turn that learning into practical improvements for teams and clients
• Ability to foster culture, inclusion, and community participation across the organization in ways that support rapid cross-team collaboration
• Experience with multiple cloud vendors and complementary platforms such as Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, and Power BI
• Experience creating data platform offerings
• Relevant certifications (Databricks Champion, Databricks Professional level, Azure Solutions Architect Expert)