Database Architect

RSI is seeking a Database Architect to help shape and grow the company's database platform and capability through guidance, enablement, and collaboration. This role works alongside DBAs, engineers, and analytics teams to develop shared standards, foster good architectural thinking, and help teams make confident, well-informed decisions about database design across both relational and non-relational technologies.

A key focus of the role is helping teams understand and adopt data contracts, versioned agreements that describe schemas, semantics, quality expectations, SLAs, and change policies. Rather than mandating compliance, the Architect acts as a trusted advisor and internal expert, building the knowledge and tooling that makes doing the right thing the easy thing.

The Database Architect works closely with database engineering, product engineering, infrastructure platform, and BI & Analytics teams, influencing through expertise, mentorship, and practical enablement. While organizationally sitting within the Architecture team, this role has a dotted-line relationship to the Database Engineering Manager, ensuring tight day-to-day collaboration with the engineering team and a shared stake in their growth and success.

What You'll Do:

Architecture and Standards

• Develop and share database architecture patterns and best practices across both relational and non-relational technologies covering schema design, data modelling, high availability, disaster recovery, and performance, offering guidance teams can draw on rather than directives they must follow.
• Help teams select the right database technology for their use case, whether relational, document, key-value, graph, or time-series, based on access patterns, scale, and consistency requirements.
• Lead collaborative efforts to define data contracts for in-house products, working with teams to shape schemas, semantics, quality expectations, change policies, and SLAs in a way that makes sense for their context and chosen technology.
• Create decision frameworks and reference materials that help teams design compliant and scalable database solutions independently.

Governance and Data Quality

• Champion data contract principles by helping teams understand their value and how to apply them with a focus on reducing risk for downstream consumers through shared understanding, not top-down enforcement.
• Partner with Analytics, product, and security teams to explore how contract metadata, validations, and policy checks can be woven into CI/CD pipelines and production workflows in practical, low-friction ways.
• Support teams in managing versioning, deprecation, and change notifications, helping them build sustainable habits around schema evolution, including schema-on-read and flexible schema patterns common in non-relational systems.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Join architecture and design conversations early in the development lifecycle, offering a perspective that helps teams spot risks and opportunities before they become problems.
• Work alongside engineers and DBAs to integrate data contracts into tooling and monitoring, making traceability and observability a natural part of how teams work rather than an afterthought.

Enablement and Coaching

• Mentor engineers and DBAs on data contract design, from schema stability to SLA definition, building genuine understanding of the downstream impact of their decisions.
• Develop reusable frameworks, templates, and examples for data contracts that teams can adapt and build on, reducing the barrier to doing things well.
• Serve as a go-to resource and sounding board on database architecture topics, both relational and non-relational, helping individuals and teams grow their expertise over time.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of experience in database design, data modelling or database engineering roles with a strong relational foundation and exposure to non-relational systems.
• Strong expertise in relational databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle preferred), including a solid understanding of RDBMS internals, performance considerations, and architectural trade-offs.
• Experience with database architecture design patterns, data modelling standards, high-availability strategies, and schema evolution.
• Familiarity with non-relational database technologies such as document stores, key-value stores, wide-column stores, graph databases, and time-series databases and an understanding of when and why to reach for them over a relational approach.
• Awareness of polyglot persistence approaches and how to govern data contracts across mixed database environments.
• Comfortable working in cloud-first or hybrid environments.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills — able to explain complex technical concepts clearly to a range of audiences and build trust with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A collaborative, patient approach to working with teams, with a genuine interest in helping others develop their skills and confidence.
• Able to travel occasionally both domestically and internationally #LI-REMOTE #LI-PROMOTE