Principal Data Architect

Unqork empowers enterprises to accelerate growth by rapidly building, testing, and running applications that are designed to be AI-native. Trusted by the world’s largest organizations in highly regulated industries, these applications become more secure over time while significantly reducing technical debt—allowing businesses to focus on innovation rather than maintenance. Unqork’s customers include Goldman Sachs, Marsh, BlackRock, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At Unqork, we value inclusive and innovative thinkers who boldly challenge the status quo. We encourage you to apply! The Impact U will make: We're seeking an experienced, visionary Principal Data Architect and Leader to drive the strategy, design, and operations of our enterprise-grade data architecture and infrastructure. This critical role leads our data functions, ensuring our platform provides a robust, scalable, secure, and highly available foundation for customers developing, deploying, and hosting applications using this robust data layer. The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in data architecture , cloud-native technologies, and operational excellence, directly impacting our ability to serve thousands of customer applications. Report to our Engineering Manager Architecture Strategy Define and own the long-term data architecture strategy for Unqork's core platform, covering data modeling, query design, storage topology, and access patterns across a complex data environment that includes MongoDB as well as integration with Relational and Columnar database models Ensure the data layer meets the security, performance, scalability, and resilience requirements of enterprise-grade, mission-critical applications. Evaluate and recommend the right database technologies, indexing strategies, caching layers, ETL and search infrastructure for each class of workload — including when to use MongoDB Atlas Search, Caching (e.g., Redis), Querying (e.g., Kafka) and Streaming components, Own the end-to-end solutions around data transfers using solutions like ETL for customers. Own the data architecture for Unqork's AI-driven development layer — defining persistence, versioning, and query standards for AI-generated configurations. Lead the design of declarative data models and schemas that enable non-technical users to build complex logic while maintaining strict data integrity. Define the architectural boundary between database-layer computation (aggregation pipelines, indexing) and application-layer computation (Node.js post-processing, in-memory caching), and establish standards for which work belongs where. Create and maintain comprehensive documentation including data architecture blueprints, indexing governance policies, query standards, and migration playbooks. Own capacity planning and cost modeling for data infrastructure resources as Unqork scales. Leadership Data Operations Mentor and grow a team of data engineers and database engineers responsible for the health and performance of Unqork's data platform. Establish data modeling best practices and enforce standardization across all environments — including schema conventions, index lifecycle management, and pagination contract design. Oversee the design and operation of Unqork's database infrastructure — defining thresholds, coverage policies, write amplification limits, and manual override processes. Drive data operational excellence by implementing and refining query performance monitoring, slow query alerting, explain plan review processes, and incident response playbooks for database degradation events. Define and enforce data access governance — including RBAC data model standards, cache TTL policies, and the rules under which eventual consistency is acceptable vs. when strong consistency is required. Comply with security regulations while working on data designs and patterns for Unqork platform. Partner with Product to translate product requirements into data ... (truncated, view full listing at source)