Principal Data Architect

Why Join GEICO?

At GEICO, we offer a rewarding career where your ambitions are met with endless possibilities.

Every day we honor our iconic brand by offering quality coverage to millions of customers and being there when they need us most. We thrive on relentless innovation to exceed our customers' expectations while making a real impact on local communities nationwide.

Founded in 1936, GEICO is a member of the Berkshire Hathaway family of companies and one of the largest auto insurers in the United States. When you join our company, we want you to feel valued, supported, and proud to work here. That's why we offer the GEICO Pledge: Great Company, Great Culture, Great Rewards, and Great Careers.

We are hiring a Principal Data Architect to define and drive our enterprise data architecture vision, centered on a domain-oriented data mesh. You will set the technical direction for how data is owned, produced, discovered and consumed across the company, and you will turn that direction into a multi-year roadmap that business and engineering leaders can fund and follow.

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role. You will partner with domain teams, platform engineering, security and the executive team to move from centralized, pipeline-driven data delivery to federated ownership of data as a product, supported by a self-serve platform and computational governance.
What You'll Do

Architecture and technical direction

• Define the target-state data architecture built on data mesh principles: domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve data infrastructure and federated computational governance.
• Establish domain boundaries and ownership models with business and engineering leaders, using domain-driven design and bounded contexts.
• Design reference architectures for data products, including ingestion, storage, transformation, serving (batch, streaming and API), and consumption patterns.
• Specify data product standards: interfaces, SLAs and SLOs, schemas and contracts, metadata, lineage, quality checks and access policies.
• Guide the design of the self-serve data platform so domain teams can build, publish and operate data products with minimal friction.

Vision and roadmap

• Own the multi-year data architecture vision and a phased roadmap covering pilot domains, platform capabilities, migration of legacy warehouse and lake assets, and decommissioning.
• Build the business case and investment narrative for executive stakeholders, including trade-offs, sequencing, risks and expected value.
• Create a maturity model and adoption plan that meets domains where they are and tracks progress over time.

Governance and standards

• Design federated governance: shared policies for security, privacy, quality, interoperability and cataloging that are automated and enforced in the platform rather than through manual review.
• Define enterprise canonical models, shared reference data and cross-domain interoperability patterns where they add value.
• Partner with security, privacy and compliance teams on regulatory requirements (for example GDPR, CCPA, SOX, HIPAA as applicable).

Leadership and influence

• Chair the architecture review forum and act as the escalation point for cross-domain design decisions.
• Mentor architects and senior engineers, and coach domain teams in data product thinking.
• Evaluate and select technologies, run proofs of concept, and publish clear architecture decision records.
• Represent the data architecture vision internally and, where relevant, to customers, partners and industry peers.

• 12+ years in data architecture, data engineering or platform architecture, with at least 3 years in a principal, staff or enterprise architect role.
• Demonstrated experience designing or leading a data mesh, data product or domain-oriented data architecture, ideally through at least one production rollout.
• Deep knowledge of modern data stack patterns: cloud data warehouses and lakehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift or similar), open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), streaming (Kafka, Flink, Spark Structured Streaming) and orchestration.
• Strong data modeling skills across dimensional, data vault, event-driven and domain models, and the judgment to know when each fits.
• Hands-on experience with data contracts, schema management, metadata and catalog tooling, lineage, and data quality and observability frameworks.
• Working command of governance, security and privacy architecture, including policy-as-code, fine-grained access control, and data classification.
• Proven ability to translate architecture into a roadmap and business case, and to win support from executives and engineering leaders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to make complex trade-offs clear to non-technical audiences.
• Experience on at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and fluency in SQL and at least one general-purpose language such as Python, Scala or Java.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  

Annual Salary

The above annual salary range is a general guideline. Multiple factors are taken into consideration to arrive at the final hourly rate/ annual salary to be offered to the selected candidate. Factors include, but are not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the role, the selected candidate’s work experience, education and training, the work location as well as market and business considerations.

The GEICO Pledge:

Great Company: Protecting customers through life’s twists and turns with innovation and integrity.

Great Careers: Personalized development programs, mentorship, and certification assistance.

Great Culture: Inclusive and collaborative culture rooted in shared success.

Great Rewards: Competitive pay, benefits, and flexibility to support your well-being and future.

The equal employment opportunity policy of the GEICO Companies provides for a fair and equal employment opportunity for all associates and job applicants regardless of race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, familial status, disability or genetic information, in compliance with applicable federal, state and local law. GEICO hires and promotes individuals solely on the basis of their qualifications for the job to be filled.

GEICO reasonably accommodates qualified individuals with disabilities to enable them to receive equal employment opportunity and/or perform the essential functions of the job, unless the accommodation would impose an undue hardship to the Company. This applies to all applicants and associates. GEICO also provides a work environment in which each associate is able to be productive and work to the best of their ability. We do not condone or tolerate an atmosphere of intimidation or harassment. We expect and require the cooperation of all associates in maintaining an atmosphere free from discrimination and harassment with mutual respect by and for all associates and applicants.