Senior Snowflake Architect / Developer – Higher Education

Role overview

A consulting firm focused on mission-driven institutions is hiring a senior practitioner to lead the architecture, design, development, and optimization of cloud data platforms for colleges and universities. The position blends hands-on engineering with solution architecture, partnering with institutional stakeholders to translate academic, operational, and research requirements into scalable Snowflake environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery, requirements, and technical design workshops with higher education clients, engaging executives, business owners, analytics teams, and application stakeholders.
• Assess existing Snowflake deployments and design future-state architectures spanning databases, schemas, virtual warehouses, security models, workload management, and secure data sharing.
• Build, optimize, and troubleshoot Snowflake solutions, including advanced SQL development, ETL/ELT pipelines, integrations with enterprise applications and APIs, and data-quality controls.
• Diagnose and resolve complex performance, query, loading, security, and integration issues while tuning warehouses, resource monitors, and query plans for cost efficiency.
• Translate institutional needs into data models, source-to-target mappings, and development specifications, mentoring client and delivery team resources throughout delivery.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience in data engineering, data architecture, warehousing, or analytics, including 4+ years of hands-on Snowflake architecture and development.
• Deep Snowflake expertise across databases, schemas, virtual warehouses, RBAC, masking, row-level security, secure views, data sharing, and warehouse sizing.
• Advanced SQL skills with complex queries, views, stored procedures, functions, and transformation logic, plus strong dimensional and analytical data modeling ability.
• Demonstrated experience designing ETL/ELT pipelines that integrate enterprise applications, databases, APIs, cloud platforms, and file-based sources.
• Prior delivery of data, analytics, or cloud data platform solutions within higher education or similar institutional environments.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to independently lead technical workstreams while managing competing technical and business priorities.

Nice to have

• SnowPro Core, SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer, or SnowPro Advanced: Architect certification.
• Familiarity with higher education domains such as student records, admissions and enrollment, advancement, finance, HR, research, or institutional reporting.
• Experience with platforms like Workday, PeopleSoft, Ellucian Banner or Colleague, Salesforce Education Cloud, Slate, or advancement CRMs.

Benefits and work setup

• Salary range of $120,000 to $188,000 USD plus eligibility for an annual discretionary bonus.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, HSA and FSA accounts, life and disability insurance, fertility and family planning benefits, and an employee assistance program.
• 11 paid federal holidays, flexible unlimited time off, and immediate-vesting 401(k) matching.
• Flexible career tracks and a culture that supports remote or hybrid work; periodic travel based on client needs.