Principal Architect - Snowflake

Own the Technical Side of Snowflake Pursuits

• Lead qualification, discovery, target architecture design, effort and risk sizing, and development of technical content for proposals and Statements of Work (SOWs).

• Build and maintain technical relationships with customer architects and technical stakeholders.

• Provide accurate assessments of migration effort, complexity, and risk, helping customers understand the true scope of their transformation initiatives.

Provide Architectural Oversight Through Delivery

• Review architecture decisions throughout delivery.

• Ensure the delivered solution aligns with what was originally scoped and proposed.

• Identify and address risks or issues early in the project lifecycle.

• Remain engaged in delivery to maintain accountability for the technical solution and outcomes.

Shape Snowflake Service Offerings

• Define the technical content of Snowflake-focused service offerings.

• Establish service scope, success criteria, and measurable outcomes.

• Determine what evidence demonstrates successful delivery.

• Create repeatable frameworks and standards that delivery teams can execute consistently.

Partner with Snowflake

• Collaborate directly with Snowflake field teams and specialist architects on joint customer engagements.

• Build productive relationships with vendor teams while representing the organization’s technical perspective.

• Effectively navigate technical challenges, feedback, and differing viewpoints from Snowflake architects and specialists

Platform and Architecture

• Account and environment design

• Warehouse and compute architecture

• Open table format strategy

• Connectivity and data residency design

• Cost architecture decisions that impact long-term scalability and affordability

The ability to design platforms that remain operationally and financially sustainable at scale is critical.

Migration and Consolidation

• Migrating enterprises from SAP, Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, appliance platforms, and increasingly other cloud data warehouses

• Assessments and migration planning

• Wave planning and execution

• Schema and workload conversion

• Reconciliation and parity validation

• Cutover planning and execution

Experience extracting data from tightly licensed ERP environments is highly valuable, including understanding:

• Inherited semantic layers

• Data extraction challenges

• Commercial licensing considerations

This represents the largest body of work anticipated for the practice and requires genuine expertise rather than general familiarity.

Data Engineering and Pipelines

• Data ingestion

• Data transformation

• Pipeline orchestration

• Testing frameworks

• Data quality instrumentation

• Building reliable, production-ready engineering processes rather than proof-of-concept implementations

Semantic and Context Layer

Experience designing and implementing:

• Consistent business definitions that can be used across the organization

• Shared semantic layers consumable by people, BI tools, and AI agents

• Enterprise data models that ensure consistency across downstream consumers

This is an area of increasing investment within Snowflake and an area where many customers require significant guidance.

Governance at the Perimeter

Experience with:

• Data classification

• Access policies

• Data masking

• Lineage management

Candidates should understand how Snowflake governance integrates with enterprise governance frameworks and be able to address governance challenges that cross platform boundaries.

Consumption Economics

Strong understanding of:

• Credit consumption management

• Warehouse sizing

• Workload placement strategies

• Cost optimization and monitoring

Candidates must be able to speak confidently with customers about platform costs and provide practical guidance on maintaining cost efficiency.

Technical Depth Expectations

Candidates do not need to be equally strong across all six areas; however, they must possess:

• Deep expertise in platform architecture

• Deep expertise in migration and consolidation

• Deep expertise in data engineering

• Sufficient proficiency across the remaining areas to identify when specialist support is needed

Snowflake Expertise

• Substantial hands-on Snowflake experience gained through:

  • A Snowflake partner organization

  • Snowflake directly

  • Managing a significant Snowflake environment internally

• This role requires Snowflake-specific expertise rather than general data platform leadership experience.

Enterprise Migration Experience

• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale migration and consolidation initiatives.

• Ability to discuss at least one major migration engagement in detail, including lessons learned and outcomes.

• Experience moving data from SAP and Oracle environments is particularly valuable.

Principal-Level Technical Leadership

• Demonstrated success operating at Principal Architect level or equivalent.

• Recognized as the senior technical authority in customer engagements.

• Trusted to commit organizations to technical approaches, architectures, and delivery scopes.

Presales Experience

• Experience in presales environments, or

• Delivery leadership experience with demonstrated ability to:

  • Lead customer discussions

  • Define scope and approach

  • Develop proposals and Statements of Work

  • Stand behind commitments made during the sales process

Vendor Collaboration

• Comfortable collaborating with and being challenged by vendor architects and technical specialists.

Certifications

• Snowflake certification preferred.

• Ability to obtain certification quickly if not already certified.

• Certification support and funding are provided