Director of Data Architecture

Job Description

We are seeking a Director of Data Architecture to lead the strategy, modernization, and execution of ABC Fitness's enterprise data architecture. This is a highly technical leadership role for someone who can operate at the Director level while remaining deeply involved in architecture and technical delivery. The role is approximately 60% hands-on architecture and technical delivery and 40% people leadership and stakeholder management. This person will lead a global team of 4–5 senior data architects while helping modernize the data environment across Databricks, AWS, lakehouse architecture, governance, and real-time data processing. The ideal candidate can personally drive architecture decisions, explain technical tradeoffs to executives, and demonstrate specific examples of what they have designed, implemented, or owned in production.

Day to Day

• Define and drive the overall data architecture strategy, roadmap, standards, and design principles.
• Remain hands-on with architecture across Databricks, AWS, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, data modeling, data marts, ingestion frameworks, and scalable pipelines.
• Lead the evolution from traditional batch processing toward real-time and low-latency data architectures.
• Drive architecture decisions around data quality, governance, lineage, security, compliance, scalability, and reliability.
• Lead modernization and migration efforts from legacy data platforms into modern Databricks/lakehouse environments.
• Establish consistent architecture and design review practices across Data and Reporting.
• Identify practical ways to incorporate AI/ML into data, reporting, analytics, engineering productivity, and decision-making.
• Lead, coach, and develop a globally distributed team of 4–5 senior data architects.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data, and executive leaders to ensure architecture decisions support business and customer outcomes.
• Communicate complex architecture decisions and technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
• Build alignment and influence technical decisions across teams outside of direct reporting relationships.

Skills and Requirements

• 10+ years of experience across data architecture, data engineering, or a closely related discipline, including leadership of senior technical professionals.

• Proven Director-level leadership of data architects, data engineers, or comparable technical teams.

• Deep, hands-on Databricks experience in production environments.

• Strong experience with AWS data architecture and cloud-native data platforms.

• Deep understanding of lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake, and Unity Catalog.

• Strong experience with data governance, lineage, security, and data quality.

• Strong foundations in data modeling, data warehousing/data marts, ingestion frameworks, distributed data systems, and scalable data pipelines.

• Experience designing architectures supporting both batch and real-time/near-real-time or low-latency processing.

• Demonstrated Databricks/data-platform migration or modernization experience, particularly involving legacy platforms.

• Working knowledge of SQL and Python sufficient to review technical designs and work credibly with engineers.

• Practical experience applying AI/ML within data, analytics, reporting, or engineering environments.

• Ability to personally explain architecture decisions, technical tradeoffs, production outcomes, and the environments they have designed or owned.

• Strong executive communication and stakeholder-management skills.

• Experience effectively collaborating with globally distributed teams.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience. Stable career progression with meaningful tenure and increasing responsibility in recent positions.

• Experience within fitness, wellness, SaaS, payments, or another subscription-based business.

• Experience building customer-facing analytics or reporting products.

• Experience with Databricks SQL, Power BI, or comparable analytics platforms. Experience directly leading teams distributed across multiple countries and time zones, particularly North America and India

We are a company committed to creating diverse and inclusive environments where people can bring their full, authentic selves to work every day. We are an equal employment opportunity/affirmative action employer that believes everyone matters. Qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, national origin, ancestry, genetic factors, age, disability, protected veteran status, military or uniformed service member status, or any other status or characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to [email protected].