Principal Data Architect Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Maximus is currently seeking an IT Principal Data Architect. The IT Principal Data Architect - (Data Migration) is a senior technical leader responsible for the architecture, engineering, and delivery of large-scale, complex data migration programs, transforming data from legacy platforms into modern, cloud-based application systems and data platforms. This role combines hands-on technical leadership, data architecture excellence, and delivery accountability to ensure migrations are accurate, scalable, secure, and production ready.

The IT Principal Data Architect provides technical direction for data architecture, migration design, and pipeline engineering while coordinating end-to-end delivery across matrixed data engineering, platform, application, testing, and operations teams. This role is accountable for data migration strategy, technical design decisions, execution quality, performance, data integrity, and long-term platform sustainability.

Why This Role Matters

Modernization initiatives succeed or fail based on data. Legacy data landscapes are often fragmented, inconsistent, poorly documented, and tightly coupled to aging systems. Migrating this data to modern systems and data platforms introduces significant technical, operational, and regulatory risk.

The IT Principal Data Architect ensures that data migrations are:

• Architected correctly to support scalability, performance, and future-state analytics

• Engineered using robust, automated, and testable pipelines

• Executed with strong data validation, reconciliation, and lineage controls

• Secure, compliant, and operationally stable at scale

• Designed to enable downstream analytics, reporting, and AI/ML use cases

This role is critical to reducing migration risk, avoiding data-related production failures, and enabling long-term data platform modernization.

This is a remote position.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Determine optimal architecture to support business requirements and solve highly complex technical challenges.

• Stay current with industry trends/development and contribute to ongoing research and development.

• Guide and mentor architects and engineers establishing and maintaining architecture of highly complex solutions.

• Produce solution architecture and estimates to support initiative proposals and business development.

• Contribute to standards and approaches for architecture of enterprise data solutions.

• Optimize overall data/information flow by reducing redundancy and enabling accessibility within security boundaries.

• Identify data-related business requirements and service standards, and translate these into actionable architecture design.

• Frequently responsible for providing guidance, coaching, and training to other employees across the organization within area of expertise.

Job-Specific Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Data Architecture & Migration Strategy

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture for complex data migration initiatives from legacy systems to modern data platforms.

• Define target-state data architectures including modern applications, data lakes, warehouses, lakehouse patterns, and real-time/streaming integrations.

• Design migration strategies (phased, domain-based, parallel run, cutover) based on data criticality, volume, and business risk.

• Ensure alignment with enterprise data architecture, integration standards, and cloud platform strategies.

Data Engineering & Technical Delivery

• Lead hands-on technical design and delivery of data ingestion, transformation, and persistence layers.

• Establish standards for ETL/ELT pipelines, orchestration, schema management, metadata, and error handling.

• Coordinate implementation across matrixed data engineers, application teams, platform engineers, QE, and operations.

• Ensure pipelines meet non-functional requirements for performance, scalability, resiliency, availability, and cost efficiency.

Data Quality, Validation & Governance

• Architect and govern data validation, reconciliation, and control frameworks for all migrations.

• Ensure data completeness, accuracy, consistency, and referential integrity across source and target systems.

• Implement data lineage, auditability, and traceability to support regulatory, financial, and operational needs.

• Partner with Security, Privacy, and Compliance teams to enforce data protection, encryption, masking, and access controls.

Program Execution & Delivery Accountability

• Manage technically complex, multi-stream data programs spanning multiple source systems and consumer platforms.

• Build and maintain detailed technical migration roadmaps, dependency maps, and milestone plans.

• Identify and mitigate risks related to data integrity, performance bottlenecks, schema drift, and operational readiness.

• Lead cutover execution, rollback planning, and post-migration stabilization.

Testing, Readiness & Production Operations

• Define and enforce test strategies for data migrations, including unit testing, data reconciliation testing, performance testing, and business validation.

• Partner with QE and UAT teams to ensure business data correctness and outcome validation.

• Own technical production readiness reviews and go-live criteria.

• Ensure operational monitoring, alerting, and incident response mechanisms are implemented prior to go-live.

Platform Enablement & Modern Data Capabilities

• Partner with Cloud and Platform teams to optimize infrastructure performance, reliability, and cost.

• Enable consumption-ready data models for analytics, reporting, APIs, and AI/ML workloads.

• Drive adoption of automation, Infrastructure-as-Code, and CI/CD for data pipelines.

Stakeholder & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as the primary technical authority for data migration and data platform delivery.

• Communicate complex technical risks, tradeoffs, and architecture decisions in business-relevant terms.

• Coordinate closely with Business, Product, Architecture, Analytics, PMO, and Operations leaders.

Team Leadership & Engineering Excellence

• Lead and mentor data engineering engineers, and technical leads.

• Establish engineering standards, design review practices, and technical governance.

• Build a culture of engineering rigor, automation, quality, and continuous improvement.

Minimum Requirements

'- Bachelor's degree in relevant field of study and 10+ years of relevant professional experience required.

Job-Specific Minimum Requirements:

• Additional years of relevant experience will be considered in lieu of degree. Master's degree preferred.

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or large-scale platform modernization.

• 5+ years leading technically complex enterprise data migration programs.

• Deep experience migrating data from legacy systems (mainframe, on-prem relational/NoSQL databases, proprietary platforms).

• Proven success delivering data platforms in cloud environments at enterprise scale.

• Experience leading delivery across matrixed engineering, application, testing, and operations organizations.

Technical & Architecture Expertise

• Data migration architecture and execution.

• Experience with CRM, ERP, Healthcare Insurance and Benefits systems and data models.

• Modern data architectures (data lakes, warehouses, lakehouse, streaming)

• ETL/ELT design patterns and orchestration frameworks.

• Schema evolution, data modeling, and domain-oriented data design.

• Data quality, reconciliation, and lineage frameworks.

• Performance tuning and large-scale data processing.

• Security, privacy, and regulatory data controls.

• DevOps and CI/CD pipelines for data engineering.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Recognized technical leader capable of influencing architecture and engineering decisions.

• Strong ability to lead senior engineers and architects in matrixed environments.

• Clear communicator able to translate technical complexity into business impact.

Success Measures

• Successful delivery of complex data migrations with high data accuracy and integrity.

• Stable, scalable, and secure modern data platforms in production.

• Minimal post-migration defects and data issues.

• Improved trust in enterprise data for analytics and operations.

• High-performing data engineering teams delivering with technical rigor.

Preferred Skills and Qualifications:

Domain Experience

• Healthcare, Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or State & Local Government.

• Experience with regulated, high-volume, or mission-critical data platforms.

Certifications:

• Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Data engineering or analytics certifications

• Architecture or platform certifications

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Maximus is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information and other legally protected characteristics.

Minimum Salary

$156,640

Maximum Salary

$234,960