At Northwestern Mutual, we are strong, innovative and growing. We invest in our people. We care and make a positive difference.
Northwestern Mutual is looking for a Lead Data Architect to help shape the future of data for the company. As part of the Office of the Chief Data Officer (CDO), the Lead Data Architect will drive efforts to provide a modern data architecture and design, to deliver data for driving insights. This position requires a strategic, analytical, organized, and motivated leader who loves data and technology.
ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• Collaborate with engineering teams to translate requirements into technical architecture.
• Provide Points of View (POV) and recommendations for cloud-native, industry-leading products along with emerging, start-up offerings.
• Partner to develop runways and roadmaps to deliver strategic outcomes through data solutions.
• Work closely with the Principal Data Architects, Engineers and the Enterprise Architecture practice on design principles and patterns.
• Ensure privacy, security and data governance is incorporated into designs and implementations.
• Develop engineering best practices and processes to produce efficient, high quality deliverables.
• Help define and mature the capabilities, platforms, frameworks, and services to deliver trusted data to the enterprise
• Engage with business, product and engineering teams on requirements and design of conceptual, logical, and physical data models
• Deliver data model design for enterprise data warehouse and data marts.
• Design and build semantic layer for business intelligence and analytic use cases
• Develop canonical data model for critical data domains to ease data integration and consumption
• Contribute to data modeling education and training programs for the company
• Deliver guidance on data modeling tooling and practices

SKILLS:

• Experience delivering data engineering and analytical solutions on public clouds (AWS preferred)
• Understanding of streaming (e.g. Kafka, Kinesis) and batch (e.g. Airflow, Dagster, AWS Glue) data transport technologies
• Data systems architecture experience, designing larger scale data engineering solutions, break down to smaller goals, prioritization
• Proven experience in multiple type of data modeling techniques (conceptual, logical, physical, semantic, etc.)
• Expertise in data warehousing approaches (Kimball, Inmon), normalized and de-normalized data models including dimensional schemas (star, snowflake)
• Able to understand relationships within data and can design models which eases acquisition, processing, and consumption of data
• Experience in cloud data warehousing (e.g. Redshift, Snowflake) and enterprise data lake (Databricks) technology
• Experience with the technical programming to access and extract data from diverse sources residing on multiple platforms and implement large, sophisticated data models by combining, synthesizing, and structuring data
• Ability to offer expertise, guidance, and mentorship regarding standard methodologies
• Performs work independently as well as a team contributor
• Coordinate multiple work efforts at once and assure that they deliver encouraged outcomes within their stated timelines
• Seek out problems quickly and learn/adapt from mistakes. Work using lean and agile methods to be able to quickly address issues
• Strong interpersonal, time management, prioritization skills
• Very comfortable with ambiguity and enjoys distilling the unknown into direction setting
• Possesses writing and verbal communications skills to communicate concepts and recommendations
• Comfortable communicating with different levels of both technical and non-technical leadership.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE:

• Minimum of 7 years of experience with data architecture / data engineering
• Minimum of 3 years of experience working within a data warehouse/data lake environment
• Minimum of 3 years of experience working with modeling toolsets (I.e. Erwin or other applicable tools)
• Working in a hybrid (on-prem and cloud) infrastructure environment
• Agile/Scrum development methodology
• Knowledge of the financial services industry

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This job is not covered by the existing Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Required Certifications:
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We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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