Principal Data Architect

Who We Are: System Administration, which also houses the Office of the President, is located in the uptown neighborhood of Denver with a few smaller offices located on the campuses.  Many of our departments support the educational and research missions of the four University of Colorado campuses, but System Administration is not considered a campus. We provide diverse opportunities for professional development, innovation, and collaboration with talented staff and faculty.  Learn more about CU System Administration. University Information Services (UIS) provides technical services and enterprise applications to the University of Colorado campuses and the Office of the President. UIS is committed to excellence in customer service and technical expertise. Through the development of enterprise applications, UIS supports the University as a whole with systems used by students, faculty, human resources employees, finance employees, and others.
Position Summary:The Principal Data Architect is responsible for data architecture primarily for the University’s customer relationship management (CRM) instances and GraphQL APIs maintained by our Integration Platform team. This position plays a key role in mapping and implementing data transformations from PeopleSoft and other enterprise system schemas into a Salesforce Education Cloud Data Architecture. In addition to this, this position is involved in data aggregation, warehousing, integration, and archiving of data for our other data domains. The Principal Data Architect often operates as an internal consultant to assist project technical and functional leads in design, approach, and tool selection for data-oriented projects.The Principal Data Architect reports to the Integration Platform Manager and is exempt from the State of Colorado Classified Staff system.
Where You Will Work:Remote – this role is eligible to work remotely within the United States, but preference with be given to state of Colorado residents.

Description of Job

Duties and Responsibilities:

Primary Responsibilities:

  • Creates, maintain, and extends University canonical data models for UIS and campus partners to access enterprise data.
  • Works and coordinates with key partners both within and without UIS to collaborate closely and secure data architecture outcomes that satisfy customer needs and support CU’s long-term business goals.
  • Handles end-to-end data analysis, modeling, and development.
  • Develops conceptual, logical, and physical data models; design data access layer specifications and communicate design for implementation.
  • Designs, creates, tests, and tunes database objects to be used by various applications, such as MuleSoft, Neo4j, Snowflake, and GraphQL.
  • Analyze and tune database queries for performance and understand core database functions that support the data models, such as GoldenGate replication, triggers, and database security.
  • Support application developers and power users by using MuleSoft, Neo4j, Snowflake, and GraphQL to access data.
  • Acts as an expert in the issues and benefits that arise at the confluence of enterprise data, including data from student systems, HR systems, finance/grants systems, advancement operations, and University-wide CRM systems.
  • Designs and leads a multi­-year CRM architecture roadmap, balancing short and long­ term goals and investments to scale and deliver our solutions globally and fulfill the organization’s high-level reporting & analytics needs.
  • Contributes to the organization’s canonical data architecture framework for making data accessible to all roles at CU System Administration.
  • Integrates new data sources into CU System Administration’s data infrastructure as the University iterates its toolsets.
  • Assist in the development of the CU’s data governance policies.
  • Leads the development of data dictionaries and diagrams for CU partners.
  • Supervise requests to internal engineering teams for production data improvements and requests to internal tool admins for process improvements to generate better data.
  • Acts as a resource for data architecture knowledge throughout the CU System Administration.
  • Researches source systems and leverages domain experts and business analysts to find data to build the data mart.
  • Collaborates with the integrations team to create integrations to and from the source and target systems.
  • Creates and maintains complex data transformation views to support canonical objects.
  • Defines and enables a technology solution selection framework, including the framework principles such as modularization, standardization, a reuse of technologies.
  • Makes recommendations on integrations strategies, platforms, and application infrastructure required to implement solutions.
  • Crafts evaluation methods to measure data quality.

Secondary Responsibilities:

  • Makes recommendations on integration strategies, enterprise architectures, platforms, and application infrastructure required to successfully implement a complete solution.
  • Implements proof-of-concept or innovation oriented technical efforts and projects to evaluate options, prove out the viability of new technologies or approaches, and the ability to articulate outcome to UIS and campus constituents.
  • Consults with campuses on any business glossary/data definitions work.
  • Designs a data mart from scratch, including:
    • Works with end users on requirements
    • Understands the data that exists in the course systems
    • Creates a data model of facts and dimensions in this mart 
    • Tests the data mart 
    • Works with data stage team to find out how to load data
    • Creates designs and documentations for the data mart 
    • Works with end users to create queries to use and view data 

Minimum Qualifications, Substitutions, Conditions of Employment & Appeal Rights

Minimum Qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree from and accredited institution of higher education, or equivalent professional experience (professional experience may be substituted for the educational requirement on a year-for-year basis)
  • Four (4) years’ database development, which includes the following:
    • Experience leveraging delivered database schemas to achieve business goals with increasing levels of responsibility.
    • Experience with relational databases, writing queries, working with views, writing stored procedures, etc.
    • Data modeling experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Six (6) years’ relational database development experience, including data modeling, as indicated above.
  • Experience with Snowflake cloud-based data platform.
  • Experience with Neo4j or GraphQL.
  • Experience with Liquibase data schema deployment automation
  • Experience with software development lifecycle and deployment tools such as git, GitLab or GitHub, and Continuous Development/Continuous Integration (CI/CD) tools and concepts.
  • Experience with one or more of the following:
    • Working in higher education
    • Integration architectures
    • Data analysis
    • Data quality and modeling tools
    • Building and administering data marts

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

To be successful in this position, employees will need to know the following:

  • Capable of envisioning and articulating the broader data landscape.
  • Ability to perform detailed data analysis, find patterns, and coalesce different data sources.
  • Ability to design, create, test, and tune database objects to be used by various applications, such as MuleSoft, neo4j, and graphQL
  • Ability to create and maintain comprehensive data models
  • Ability to collect and document business needs and translate into technical specifications
  • Documentation skills to communicate data models, integration patterns, data dictionaries, and data lineage within CU System Administration as well as to customers
  • Ability to write technical documentation, reports, briefings, and specifications understood by a variety of technical and non-technical audiences
  • Ability to translate and explain technical concepts and vocabulary in common terms to non-technical audiences
  • Organizational skills to set and meet goals and deadlines, manage appointments, create schedules, coordinate and facilitate meetings, and make decisions
  • Ability to work under stress, handle multiple concurrent and competing tasks and responsibilities, and adapt to changing priorities while maintaining personal effectiveness, focusing on activities that have the greatest impact on meeting work commitments
  • Ability to work independently with minimal direction and reliable professional judgment, as well as collaboratively with a team to achieve desired results
  • Ability to maintain a good work ethic, positive problem-solving demeanor, and passion for the work performed
  • Ability to self-start and take initiative in completing daily tasks and special projects
  • Ability to navigate a sophisticated political environment
  • Knowledge of the business and organizational structure of CU 
  • Ability to communicate and work effectively with individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds, cultures, and ages
  • Interpersonal skills to establish and maintain partnerships with internal and external constituencies and the ability to facilitate interaction, communication, and teamwork between others
  • Oral, written, and listening communication skills to accurately interpret what others are saying and convey messages, information, concepts, and details accurately and clearly
  • Digital literacy to use Microsoft Office programs, the knowledge of common computer operating systems and networking fundamentals, and the ability to assess sophisticated data
  • Computer programming skills – including the ability to evaluate and solve problems, stay organized, be cognizant of and address details, and use common database tools such as TOAD or SQLDeveloper
  • Knowledge of information technology service management (ITSM) principles and standard methodologies
  • Ability to learn and apply new technologies
APPLY HERE!