Principal Infrastructure Architect: Data Platform

Role overview Serve as a Principal Infrastructure Architect embedded with the data engineering organization, acting as the architecture team's partner for building and running data platforms well on GCP. The seat is a cloud architect role with a data specialty, requiring a strong cloud, Kubernetes, networking, and infrastructure-as-code foundation plus credible hands-on depth in data systems. The work spans patterns, enablement, evaluation, and shared stewardship of architecture standards across the company.

Responsibilities - Establish and maintain paved-road patterns for data workloads, including infrastructure-as-code modules, CI/CD for data jobs and pipelines, monitoring, alerting, performance, and cost practices. - Help data teams adopt those patterns, review designs, and work through hard infrastructure trade-offs alongside them. - Run structured proof-of-concepts for emerging data technologies and vendor offerings, producing written recommendations engineering leaders can act on. - Participate in weekly architecture reviews across all domains, contribute to standards and architectural decision records, and take a share of general infrastructure consulting. - Define patterns for performance, cost, observability, backup, restore, and disaster recovery for data stores, including RTO/RPO targets, in partnership with FinOps. - Prototype reference implementations, open the first pull requests, and stay hands-on through enablement for critical initiatives.

Requirements - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. - 10–15+ years of cloud infrastructure, platform, or data infrastructure engineering experience, including several years establishing patterns and standards used by multiple teams. - Production experience architecting on GCP and/or AWS beyond data services, covering compute, Kubernetes, VPC networking, private connectivity, IAM and workload identity, and cost and reliability trade-offs. - Strong Terraform and GitOps skills, including designing and reviewing modules other teams depend on. - Hands-on experience operating data infrastructure at multi-terabyte to petabyte scale with high throughput, concurrency, and latency-sensitive workloads. - Deep production experience in at least two data domains such as streaming and stream processing, relational operational databases, NoSQL, columnar analytics and lakehouse, search, or pipeline orchestration, with fluency across the rest.

Nice to have - Experience influencing without positional authority and getting patterns adopted across organizations you do not manage.

Benefits and work setup - Remote role with a published US base salary range of $157,500–$247,500 USD, plus potential eligibility for bonus, commission, equity, and additional benefits. - Holistic mind, body, and lifestyle well-being programs are offered alongside comprehensive benefits.