Principal Data Architect

hatch I.T.

. Redesign and rebuild Babel Street's data infrastructure and pipelines .

Posted 11/4/2026full-timeReston • Virginia • United StatesLead💰 $220,000 - $250,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

Use this summary to align your resume positioning with the role.

Demonstrates extensive expertise in designing and migrating large-scale data platforms to Google Cloud, with a strong focus on data governance, quality, and cost efficiency. Proven ability to lead engineering teams and mentor senior engineers while implementing advanced data processing and retrieval systems.

Highest-signal resume keywords

GCP Data ServicesPython ProgrammingDistributed ProcessingData GovernanceCloud Migration

ATS Keywords

Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills

PythonJavaScalaGoSQLSparkBeam/DataflowFlinkKafkaElasticsearch

Soft Skills

Clear Written CommunicationMentoring

Tools & Technologies

BigQueryDataflowPub/SubGCSSpannerAirflowDagster

Certifications & Qualifications

US Security Clearance

Industry Keywords

Data InfrastructureCloud MigrationData GovernanceAI ReadinessOSINTNational SecurityLaw EnforcementFedRAMP/IL5Data ObservabilityGraph Databases

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AirflowAWSBabelBigQueryCloudElasticSearchGoogle Cloud PlatformJavaKafkaPulsarPythonScalaSparkSQLGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Redesign and rebuild Babel Street's data infrastructure and pipelines
Set the target architecture, write critical production code and lead engineers through a multi-year migration of a petabyte-scale platform to Google Cloud
Map the current data estate and publish a target-state architecture and sequenced migration plan
Design and build standardized streaming and batch ingestion, enrichment and delivery systems running at millions of documents per day
Lead the GCP migration, deciding what to migrate, rebuild or retire and owning each wave's technical design
Rationalize warehouse, search/index, object, vector and graph storage and reduce expensive workload costs
Build AI data services, hybrid retrieval and provenance/lineage capabilities
Build governance and compliance capabilities for privacy and AI readiness
Implement data contracts, quality checks, observability, SLOs and cost attribution
Own pipeline architecture, storage/compute/search, cloud migration, retrieval/AI enablement, data quality/lineage/economics and technical standards
Mentor senior engineers, partner with offshore engineering teams and serve as escalation point for major data incidents
Report to the SVP of Engineering and collaborate with Architecture, AI, Graph and Product teams

Requirements

What you’ll need

12+ years building data systems, with at least 5 as the lead architect or principal engineer on a large-scale data platform
Strong in Python plus at least one of Java, Scala or Go, and fluent in SQL
Personally led a major re-architecture or cloud migration of a data platform
Deep hands-on experience with distributed processing and streaming, such as Spark, Beam/Dataflow, Flink, Kafka, Pub/Sub or Pulsar
Production experience with GCP data services such as BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, GCS and Spanner
AWS experience expected
Expert-level operation of Elasticsearch or OpenSearch at scale, including cluster sizing, mappings, aggregation performance and cost tuning
Experience with lakehouse table formats such as Iceberg, Delta or Hudi
Experience with orchestration such as Airflow/Composer, Dagster or similar
Track record of materially cutting platform costs without hurting performance
Clear written communication and ability to write design documents for both executives and senior engineers
Ability to obtain a US security clearance
Preferred: experience with vector search, embeddings pipelines, retrieval architectures, entity resolution, knowledge graphs, graph databases, OSINT, national security or law enforcement, FedRAMP/IL5 or air-gapped environments, data observability/lineage/governance tooling, and combining scraped multimedia with structured third-party data

Benefits

Comp & perks

Babel Street covers 85-100% of monthly premium costs for Medical, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability insurances for you and your family
Traditional and Roth 401(K) with a very competitive match
Unlimited Flexible Leave
12 paid Federal Holidays
Tuition Reimbursement Program for continuing education