Principal Data Architect
BlueFlag is hiring a Principal Data Architect to lead data architecture for a premier data and artificial intelligence (AI) platform at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The platform powers reporting, analytics, and machine learning for Veterans' health and benefits. This remote role is customer-facing every day. You will lead senior data engineers, guide VA leaders through architecture decisions, and help build the platform's future on Azure Commercial with Databricks and Unity Catalog.
We're looking for an engineer first: someone who built pipelines and warehouses hands-on, then grew into leading teams and advising customers. You'll join a friendly, collaborative team doing work that makes a real difference for Veterans and their families.
What You'll Do
- Work with customers daily: lead architecture discussions, brief VA stakeholders, and turn their needs into clear designs and decisions.
- Lead and mentor senior data engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on problem solving.
- Set architecture and standards for ingestion, storage, modeling, and serving with Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Databricks, and Delta Lake.
- Architect the platform's move to Azure Commercial, with Databricks as the engineering platform and Unity Catalog governing data, access, lineage, and models.
- Design metadata-driven frameworks that move thousands of tables through batch, incremental, change d
