Associate Principal Architect, Data and Analytics Platforms

Role Summary

Associate Principal Architect, Data and Analytics Platforms. The role supports the design and creation of cloud-based products and services to meet the technology needs of Exelixis. It helps define and design the cloud platform, including cloud automation tools and standards, CI/CD pipelines, DevOps tooling and AWS account provisioning automation. The position also works with application support teams to redefine the interface between cloud platform products and application installation and configuration processes.

Responsibilities

• Create and lead the implementation of robust, scalable, and secure data architecture strategies on AWS and Databricks to support advanced analytics and AI/ML initiatives.
• Design and implement data ingestion, processing, storage, and reporting solutions leveraging AWS services like S3, Glue, Redshift, Lake Formation, Athena, Kinesis, MSK, EC2, ECS, Databricks.
• Provide expert guidance and hands-on development on the AWS and Databricks data technologies.
• Develop and maintain conceptual, logical, and physical data models, and design data lakes and data warehouses for optimal performance.
• Establish and enforce data governance policies, data quality standards, security protocols, and compliance frameworks (e.g., FAIR, GxP, HIPAA, IAM, Data Mesh).
• Implement and manage AWS Lake Formation and Databricks Unity Catalog to enable centralized, fine-grained data governance across all data assets.
• Design and develop scalable and resilient application compute infrastructure using AWS EKS and ECS.
• Lead the development of automated CI/CD pipelines for notebooks, jobs, and infrastructure-as-code for AWS, DBT, and Databricks environments.
• Utilize tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins to automate deployments and promote consistent releases.
• Manage and optimize AWS, Databricks and other data platform resource utilization to maintain cost-effectiveness.
• Design and implement a multi-layered Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) using Delta Lake to ensure data quality and reliability.
• Develop and publish data engineering best practices and patterns.

Qualifications

• Proven experience architecting and implementing lake house architectures on AWS data technologies (Glue, Lake Formation, Redshift, Athena) and Databricks.
• Proven experience designing, developing, and managing data engineering pipelines at scale.
• Expertise in various data modeling techniques (conceptual, logical, and physical).
• Expertise in programming languages and frameworks such as DBT, Python, SparkSQL and SQL.
• Deep knowledge of AWS services, including IAM, security, data storage, data processing, compute, and analytics services.
• Strong understanding of modern data architecture patterns (e.g., data mesh, lakehouse).
• Hands-on experience with big data technologies like Apache Spark, AWS Glue, Databricks, Apache Iceberg, and Delta Tables.
• Certifications: Professional AWS and Databricks certifications are highly valued and relevant.

Skills

• Advanced knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting services (EC2, RDS, Systems Manager, IAM, etc.).
• Advanced knowledge with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools, especially Terraform.
• Intermediate knowledge with cloud and infrastructure automation.
• Intermediate knowledge of CI/CD development and deployment practices.

Education

• Master's degree in a relevant field with 9 years of experience; or
• Bachelor‚Äôs degree in a relevant field with 11 years of related experience; or
• Equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Technical certification may be required.

Experience

• At least 10 years of experience in cloud infrastructure in a highly available and production environment.
• Experience in a SOX and FDA regulated environment is a plus.

Knowledge, Skills And Abilities

• Advanced knowledge of AWS hosting services (EC2, RDS, Systems Manager, IAM, etc.).
• Advanced knowledge with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools, especially Terraform.
• Intermediate knowledge with cloud and infrastructure automation.
• Intermediate knowledge of CI/CD practices.

Additional Requirements

• Travel: Minimal travel required.