Senior Data Architect

Senior Data Architect 

Salary Range: $140,000 - $160,000 annually

About the Role 

Hunter Strategy is seeking a Senior Data Architect to support a new mission with a large federal civilian agency. This role has a single purpose. You work alongside the Chief Enterprise Architect and the Solution Architect to determine the enterprise architecture for a new, greenfield program, and you own the data dimension of that work. 

The program runs on centralized federal data with a database-per-service pattern. Each service owns its data store and its schema, and each deploys on its own schedule. Coherence across an ecosystem of this size comes from the standards you set, with API contracts holding the line at service boundaries and a consolidated data lake and warehousing layer bringing service data together for analytics and reporting. A large number of development teams operating in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment will build against what you design. You define the enterprise data strategy, document the baseline thoroughly, and hand the continuing architecture team a foundation they can maintain. 

What You Will Do 

• Work alongside the Chief Enterprise Architect and the Solution Architect to determine the enterprise architecture for the program 

• Design the foundational enterprise data strategy & governance plan  

• Define data standards and patterns for a microservices, database-per-service architecture 

• Work with API designers and development teams to hold each service to its own data scope, providing guidance on microservice resilience & isolation as it pertains to data and API design 

• Define the data lake or warehousing strategy, and analytics system that consolidates service data for reporting and business intelligence 

• Set data lifecycle strategies that account for service scaling and regulatory requirements while keeping cloud total cost of ownership low, covering sharding, data temperature, and archival handling, and assist every team in applying them 

• Produce the data architecture artifacts that development teams across the program consume and build against 

• Document the data plan baseline for handoff to the continuing architecture team as the program moves from establishment into sustainment 

• Work with a team of Agile practitioners and architects throughout the establishment phase 

What You Bring 

• 8+ years of data architecture or enterprise data management experience 

• Experience designing enterprise data models for large, multi-system organizations 

• Experience with microservice data patterns, including database-per-service designs 

• Comfort across Big Data, ETL and ELT pipelines, data warehousing, data analytics, business intelligence, and related systems 

• Experience supporting a SAFe environment or a large portfolio of concurrent development teams 

• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust suitability determination 

Preferred 

• Experience with federal data environments and data governance in the public sector 

• Familiarity with API-first integration standards, including OpenAPI and gRPC 

• Experience with cloud-native data platforms, including storage tiering and archival strategies (for example, S3 Glacier or equivalent) 

• DAMA CDMP, TOGAF, or comparable architecture certification 

Position Details 

This position is contingent upon contract award, with a tentative start date of September 14, 2026. Work is remote-first; occasional onsite support in Washington, DC may be coordinated with the Government. Hunter Strategy is an equal opportunity employer.

This posting is for a current vacancy and the employer intends to fill this position no sooner than September 14, 2026. This position is contingent upon contract award.