Principal Infrastructure Architect: Data Platform

Required

• Influence and communication. You can present a recommendation, show its value, and back it with prototypes, benchmarks, and documented rationale. You've gotten patterns adopted across engineering organizations you don't manage by working with the teams involved.
• Cloud infrastructure foundation. Production experience architecting on GCP and/or AWS beyond the data services: compute and Kubernetes (GKE or equivalent) as the runtime for data workloads, VPC networking and private connectivity to managed services, IAM and workload identity, and cost and reliability trade-offs. Strong Terraform and GitOps skills, including designing and reviewing modules other teams depend on. You can review a service-mesh or network design in architecture review with credibility.
• Hands-on data infrastructure experience at scale. You've built and operated the infrastructure under data platforms at multi-terabyte to petabyte scale, with high throughput, high concurrency, and latency-sensitive workloads, and you know what breaks in production.
• Depth in at least two data domains, fluency across the rest. Deep production experience in at least two of: streaming and stream processing (Kafka/Confluent, Flink); relational operational databases (PostgreSQL); NoSQL (MongoDB); columnar analytics and lakehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Iceberg); search (Elasticsearch/Solr); pipeline orchestration and processing (Airflow, Dataflow/Beam). Enough fluency in the others to evaluate, review, and learn them quickly.
• Performance and cost engineering. You've diagnosed and fixed expensive or slow data workloads (query plans, storage layout, pipeline design, warehouse spend) and turned the fixes into reusable patterns and monitoring that other teams picked up.
• Development and operational depth. You can dive into code to prove out a pattern and test behavior under load, and you'd rather ship a working prototype than a diagram.
• Technology evaluation. You've run rigorous evaluations that separate vendor pitch from architectural fit, and your recommendations have been used by engineering leaders and procurement.