Data Architect

SUMMARY 

At Magnolia, the Data Architect will design and evolve the data infrastructure that drives smarter business decisions across merchandising, eCommerce, supply chain to customer insight. In this role, you will build scalable, modern data solutions and act as a key partner across business, product, and engineering teams to ensure Magnolia’s decisions are grounded in truth, quality, accuracy, and accessibility. This position works from the Magnolia Headquarters in Waco, Texas. The Data Architect reports to the Sr. Manager of Engineering and has no supervisory responsibilities.   

 ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Design robust, secure, and scalable data architectures to support high-volume retail data from systems including POS, ERP, OMS, WMS, CRM, and digital commerce platforms 
• Define logical and physical data models for key domains including customer, product, inventory, and transactions. Align structures across source systems and analytics layers 
• Design data lakes, data warehouses, and semantic layers that support enterprise BI, self-service reporting, and customer analytics (360° view) across digital and physical touchpoints* 
• Lead the design of efficient ETL/ELT pipelines, data orchestration workflows, and streaming integrations to enable near real-time insights* 
• Define and enforce standards for data integrity, lineage, classification, and stewardship. Establish guardrails for accuracy, security, and privacy* 
• Lead efforts to refactor or migrate legacy systems to cloud-native platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks. Drive adoption of scalable tools and modern practices* 
• Work cross-functionally to understand analytical needs and translate them into clear, performant data structures and access patterns 
• Ensure data infrastructure supports advanced use cases like predictive modeling, customer segmentation, and machine learning pipelines 
• Maintain architectural artifacts including data dictionaries, lineage diagrams, and process documentation. Serve as the SME for how Magnolia’s data flows and fits together* 
• Provide guidance to data engineers, analysts, and stakeholders on best practices, performance tuning, and scalable design decisions 
• Perform other duties as assigned 

*Metrics evaluated on Performance Review 

 COMPETENCIES 

• Teamwork: Contribute to a team environment supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Work effectively with others, be a team player, and contribute towards team goals. 
• Critical Thinking: Propose creative solutions within specific specialization. Ability to analyze data, trends, and patterns. 
• Expertise: Expert in knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques relevant to specialization. Able to develop expertise in related area(s). 
• Communication: Actively engage in listening to teammates and guests and be open to feedback from guests, peers, and management. 
• Guest Focus: Ability to proactively understand and meet guest needs, ensuring a personalized and guest-centric experience. 
• Strategy and Goal Setting: Approach change with positivity and curiosity. Know your role in achieving team goals. 

 ELIGIBILITY QUALIFICATIONS 

• Bachelor's degree from a 4-year college or university preferred 
• 8+ years of experience of industry experience preferred 
• Experience designing enterprise data platforms in retail, eCommerce, or logistics environments 
• Strong expertise in data modeling, data warehousing, and cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks) 
• Proficiency with ETL/ELT tools and data orchestration frameworks (e.g., dbt, Airflow, Informatica, Boomi) 
• Experience with SQL, Python, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) 
• Deep understanding of data integration tools and platforms and a strong knowledge of SQL, Python, and cloud services 
• Experience working with customer data platforms (CDPs), loyalty analytics, or recommendation systems. 
• Knowledge of data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and security best practices in retail environments. 
• Familiarity with tools like Tableau, Looker, Power BI, or custom dashboarding solutions. 
• Must be available to be on call as business needs require 

 PHYSICAL DEMANDS 

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use hands and arms to reach, handle, feel; utilize fine motor dexterity of fingers; talk or hear and taste or smell. The employee is frequently required to stand and walk. The employee is frequently required to climb or balance and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. The employee must frequently lift and/or move up to 10 pounds, and occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. 

 WORK ENVIRONMENT 

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occasionally exposed to outside weather conditions. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.   

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  

Magnolia is an Equal Opportunity Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth and pregnancy-related conditions), gender identity or expression (including transgender status), sexual orientation, marital status, military service and veteran status, physical or mental disability, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws and ordinances. 

 This job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by an employee in this classification. It is not to be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications of employees assigned to this job. Management has the right to add to, revise, or delete information in this description at any time.