MeridianLink

MeridianLink

Principal Data Architect - AI

US Remote · Principal

Sponsorship not specified$12k-$15kDetected 77 days ago
PythonSQLDatabricksAzureMachine LearningdbtData EngineeringComplianceUnityCommunication

About the role

  • Reporting to the Vice President of Data, the Principal Data Architect is the senior technical authority for how data is modeled, integrated, governed, and consumed across MeridianLink.
  • The right candidate has done this before in a FinTech SaaS environment and understands the trade-offs that come with multi-tenant data, regulated workloads, and customer-facing analytics.

Responsibilities

  • Define the enterprise data architecture: Own the conceptual, logical, and physical data models for MeridianLink's analytical and operational data platform, including source-aligned, integrated, and consumption-ready layers.
  • Build the meta-model: Design and maintain a meta-model that captures entities, relationships, business definitions, ownership, lineage, sensitivity classifications, and SLAs - and make sure it is wired into our tooling, not stuck in a slide deck.
  • Drive the lakehouse strategy: Architect our medallion (bronze / silver / gold) Delta Lake patterns on Databricks
  • Be hands-on: Write PySpark, SQL, and Delta Lake code. Build reference implementations, prototype patterns, review pull requests, and personally model critical domains rather than delegating every detail.
  • Lead data integration design: Set patterns for ingestion through Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC) and direct Databricks pipelines, including CDC, batch, streaming, and API-based sourcing from our SaaS products and third-party systems.
  • Champion data governance and lineage: Partner with data governance, security, and compliance leaders to operationalize cataloging, lineage, classification, masking, and access controls across the platform (Unity Catalog, IDMC, and adjacent tools).
  • Partner across the business: Work closely with Product, Engineering, Analytics, ML, Finance, Risk, and Customer-facing teams to translate business needs into durable data designs.
  • and drive multi-quarter initiatives that materially improve how MeridianLink uses its data.
  • Drive the lakehouse strategy: Architect our medallion (bronze / silver / gold) Delta Lake patterns on Databricks; define standards for partitioning, clustering, schema evolution, slowly changing dimensions, and historical reproducibility.
  • Influence the roadmap: Identify gaps in tooling, capability, and skill; propose investments; and drive multi-quarter initiatives that materially improve how MeridianLink uses its data.

Requirements

  • 12-15+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data warehousing, and data architecture roles, with at least the most recent several years at the architect level.
  • Deep, hands-on expertise with Databricks and PySpark on Azure, including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, structured streaming, and performance tuning at scale.
  • Production experience with Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC) - or comparable enterprise integration platforms - for ingestion, transformation, and metadata-driven pipelines.
  • Proven track record of designing and implementing detailed meta-models and end-to-end data models (conceptual, logical, and physical) that have shipped to production and stood up over time.
  • Strong command of dimensional modeling (Kimball), Data Vault 2.0, and modern lakehouse patterns, including the ability to choose the right approach for the right use case.
  • Expert SQL skills and strong proficiency in Python/PySpark

Nice to have

  • Prior experience designing data architectures for multi-tenant SaaS platforms with customer-facing analytics or embedded reporting.
  • Experience supporting Loan Origination, deposit account opening, or other consumer lending workflows and the underlying data domains (applicants, applications, decisions, funding, servicing, credit data, fraud, KYC/AML).
  • Familiarity with Azure data services (ADLS Gen2, Azure Data Factory, Event Hubs, Synapse, Purview) and their interplay with Databricks.
  • Experience with dbt, Great Expectations, or other modern data quality and transformation tooling layered on top of Databricks.
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
  • Lakehouse: Azure Databricks, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, PySpark, SQL
  • Integration: Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC)
  • Cloud: Microsoft Azure (ADLS Gen2, Azure Data Factory, Event Hubs, Key Vault)

Skills

  • Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC)
  • Microsoft Azure (ADLS Gen2, Azure Data Factory, Event Hubs, Key Vault)

Compensation

  • $12k-$15k
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