Cloud Data Architect

We believe in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future in a technology-driven world.

As strategies, technologies and innovation collide, we create opportunity from complexity.

Our diverse teams of experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough use of technologies to progress further, faster. Our clients adapt and transform, and together we achieve enduring results.

An innovation and transformation consultancy, we are over 3,200 specialists in consumer, defense and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government, health and life sciences, manufacturing, and transport. Our people are strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers and technologists. We operate globally from offices across the UK, US, Europe, and the Nordics.

PA. Bringing Ingenuity to Life.

NA Analytics is seeking talented, tenured, and proven Cloud Data Architects to help support our growing team as we continue to drive positive business impact tor our valued clients.  As many of the world’s enterprises have migrated their data assets and others are actively pursuing cloud migration, the demand for senior and mid-level architects with the right level of expertise has increased.

If this position appears to fit and you are interested in being a part of something really special.

Key Areas of Responsibility

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment 

• Gathers customer insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Adapts business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
• Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across communities to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT).

Technical Expertise & Architecture Design and Deployment

• Acts as a subject matter expert in ONE of the following areas:
• As a Data & AI Solution Architect, you support customer/partner projects as a subject matter expert in two or more of the following Azure AI Platform Cloud solutions (or equivalent on  AWS, GCP platforms):
• Azure Databricks or Spark oriented stack on AWS or GCP platforms
• Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search is plus
• Data Science / Machine Learning including Azure Machine Learning, ML Server, Azure Data bricks ,AWS Sagemaker is plus
• Snowflake is plus
• Lakehouse Architecture is plus

OR

• As a Data & Analytics Architect, you support customer/partner projects as a subject matter expert in one of the data-specific areas: 
• SQL Server
• Deployments and migrations to the cloud
• Open-source database deployments and migrations
• Cloud Scale Analytics
• Data Governance
• "Hands on" Experience creating Proof of Concepts, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for customers that lead to production deployments. Demonstrates complex concepts and proves the capability of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Applies technical knowledge of enterprise-scale architecture solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. shaping and enhancing customers' requirements.
• Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation. Identifies technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) for selected products to accelerate architecture implementations and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.
• Applies methodology and governance, as directed, to minimize business and technical risks and adhere to quality assurance while contributing to design and/or delivery of solutions (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Demonstrates an understanding of customer/partner conditions of success.

Practice Development

• Supports research projects and contributes to scoping surveys for customers/partners to assess potential intellectual property (IP) needs or process changes. Learns to identify opportunities for IP re-use and consumption.

Trusted Advisor

• Identifies and begins developing impactful relationships with internal teams and customer and partner/MCS technical specialists during initial preparation and ramp-up stages.
• Respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately. 
• Understands the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to demonstrate Microsoft's value to customers/partners.

Thought Leadership

• Shares ideas, insight, and technical input with virtual team members (e.g., account team, enterprise channel managers, partner development manager [PDMs]) using a working knowledge of specific Microsoft architectures and other relevant products. Actively looks for relevant communities to learn from and contribute to.
• Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team. 

Customer Usage

• Participates in discussions around architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer business value. Ensures that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected. 

Qualifications

We are currently hiring across a variety of teams with various levels of skills and experience required. Below maps the minimum required qualifications to be considered for these positions.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies
  • OR equivalent experience

Preferences

• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge for Artificial Intelligence Architects: 
• Application development skills - ability to stand up a back end (Python or similar), front end (node.js or similar) 
• Architecture - the ability to create and explain 3-tier architecture diagrams, system context diagrams, system interaction diagrams, etc. 
• Experience in big data workloads like HDInsight, Hadoop, Spark,  
• Advanced Analytics including Azure Databricks, visualization tools as Power BI 
• Hands-on experience working on AI solutions, end-to-end, that have gone to production

OR

• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge for Data & Analytics Architects: 
• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e., Jenkins, Azure Developer Services, GitHub) 
• Container orchestration systems (i.e., Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub).
• Certification in one or more of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, mobile, Database, Data Engineering, Data Analytics, Big Data, BI, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
• Expertise in two or more data estate workloads like Teradata, Oracle Exadata, IBM Netezza, SAP (HANA, BW), HDInsight, Hadoop, Cloudera/Hortonworks, Apache Spark, Snowflake, MapR, AWS (Redshift, Glue), Google (BigQuery), MemSQL, MarkLogic, Qubole, Pivotal (Greenplum), Actian (Avalanche), Alibaba (MaxCompute)