Data Platform & Data Architecture Consultant

Role overview

As a Data Platform & Data Architecture Consultant at Netlight, you help clients turn data infrastructure into a competitive advantage. You design cloud data landscapes, build and scale cloud data platforms, and define governance “guardrails” that allow organizations to scale data access safely.

You may work as a data architect, lead a platform build, or provide strategic advisory, often blending these within a single engagement.

What you’ll do

Building and operating platforms

• Design, provision, and harden end-to-end cloud data platforms (storage/compute, networking, security, IAM, observability, and cost).
• Codify infrastructure with Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation.
• Establish governance frameworks such as:
  • data catalogs
  • data contracts
  • RBAC models
  • SLAs
• Build platforms that multiple teams and business domains can rely on as they grow.

Shaping the data architecture

• Design logical and physical data models.
• Map data flows and lineage across systems.
• Make structural decisions for how data is organized, integrated, and consumed.
• Examples include:
  • target-state architecture for legacy-to-modern cloud lakehouse migrations
  • defining domain boundaries and data product interfaces for data mesh adoption

Advising and translating

• Partner with data engineers, data scientists, product owners, and senior stakeholders to understand business needs.
• Translate those needs into platform strategy and architecture decisions.
• Act as a trusted advisor to technical leadership (e.g., a CTO) on how data infrastructure should evolve.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in Engineering/Technology (e.g., CS, Data Engineering, Information Systems)
• English fluency (verbal and written)
• 2–4 years of full-time experience in cloud data infrastructure, data platform engineering, or data architecture
• Agile product/delivery team experience
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) covering compute, storage, networking, and identity management
• Experience with at least one modern cloud data platform (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, Microsoft Fabric)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation)
• CI/CD and DevOps workflows
• Experience with data modeling, data architecture, and designing data flows/integration patterns
• Experience designing/operating data governance, security controls, and platform observability in multi-team/multi-domain environments
• Ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholders in client-facing settings

Preferred qualifications

• Data mesh, data product, or data lakehouse architectures at organizational level
• Enterprise data architecture depth (conceptual/logical/physical modeling, data lineage, dimensional modeling, Data Vault)
• Multi-tenant platform design and/or multi-cloud environments
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and Docker in data platform contexts