Director, Data Architecture & Design

Director, Data Architecture & Design (Hybrid - Columbia, SC)

The Director, Data Architecture & Design, is a visionary and hands-on leader. They design and implement our enterprise data architecture. They define and govern the conceptual, logical, and physical data models across the organization, while playing a critical role in shaping and delivering a unified Canonical Data Model (CDM) to enable seamless integration, interoperability, and analytics across systems. This role requires deep expertise in enterprise data modeling, a strong understanding of modern data platforms, and a pragmatic approach to unifying business and technical needs through scalable data design.

What you’ll do

• Define and evolve the enterprise data architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with business goals and digital transformation initiatives.
• Drive adoption of standardized modeling practices across teams (e.g., conceptual, logical, physical).
• Design and maintain enterprise-wide data models that abstract business semantics and align with technical implementations.
• Lead development of Canonical Data Models/Common Data Models for integration, data sharing, and analytics use cases.
• Ensure models adhere to data governance standards, regulatory requirements, and industry best practices.
• Partner with business, data engineering, and application teams to translate business needs into sound data design.
• Act as a liaison between data governance, analytics, software engineering, and platform teams to ensure model consistency and reuse.
• Support data platform modernization initiatives (e.g., data lakehouse, data mesh, cloud data warehouses).
• Provide architectural oversight for MDM, metadata, and integration solutions involving structured and semi-structured data.
• Establish and enforce data modeling standards, tools (e.g., Erwin, PowerDesigner, dbt), and processes across the enterprise.
• Drive model versioning, lineage, and documentation practices to support auditability and discovery.

What you'll need

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
• At least ten (10) years of experience in data architecture and modeling across complex, distributed environments.
• Proven track record of leading the development of enterprise data models and canonical models at scale.
• Expertise in data modeling (conceptual, logical, physical) using industry-standard tools and notations (e.g., UML, IDEF1X).
• Deep knowledge of data integration patterns, APIs, and event-based architectures.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases, cloud-native data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Azure, AWS), and big data ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of data governance, quality, metadata, and master data management practices.
• Experience with healthcare, financial services, or regulated data environments.
• Familiarity with standards such as FHIR, BIAN, or NIEM.
• Exposure to semantic models and knowledge graphs is a plus.
• Experience working with Collibra, Informatica, or similar data governance platforms.

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