Data Architect

  • GS001 GuideStone Financial Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention
  • Dallas, TX
  • 8mo ago
  • Full-Time
  • On-site

Experience GuideStone!

We are an innovative organization that invests in the spiritual, relational, financial, physical and professional development of our employees. We have a culture that values excellence, teamwork, humility, integrity, compassion and stewardship.

What We Offer You!

We offer employees a generous benefits package, flexible work schedules, the opportunity to be involved in community outreach and tuition reimbursement.

Job Summary

GuideStone is seeking a visionary and hands-on Enterprise Data Architect to lead the design and evolution of our enterprise data estate. This role blends strategic leadership with deep technical expertise to enable secure, trustworthy, and well-modeled data for analytics and applications. As a faith-based, non-profit organization, GuideStone offers a mission-driven culture, strong work/life balance, and a collaborative environment where your work directly supports meaningful outcomes. This is a unique opportunity to shape data architecture across Azure platforms while mentoring teams and influencing enterprise-wide decisions.

What You'll Do

  • Define and maintain reference architectures for batch, streaming, and real-time data across Azure Data Lakehouse, Microsoft Fabric, Synapse, and Databricks

  • Drive convergence on data modeling approaches (dimensional, medallion and semantic) and sponsor canonical models and domain boundaries

  • Design and prototype data pipelines, semantic layers, and medallion/lakehouse patterns using SQL, PySpark, and Azure tools

  • Establish data governance standards including SLAs/SLOs, quality rules, lineage, and metadata management via Microsoft Purview

  • Implement secure data platform practices: RBAC/ABAC, encryption, key management, and network isolation

  • Lead architecture reviews, translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders, and align data strategy with business outcomes

  • Mentor data engineers, analysts, and citizen developers; elevate engineering standards through enablement and playbooks

  • Guide incident reviews, root-cause analysis, and architecture health tracking to ensure operational excellence

What You'll Need

Required Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, MIS, Engineering, or related field—or equivalent experience

  • 10+ years in data/analytics, including 3–5+ years in architecture or lead roles

  • Deep expertise in Azure data services: Microsoft Fabric, Synapse, Databricks, ADLS Gen2

  • Advanced data modeling experience dimensional, medallion and semantic modeling for Power BI

  • Strong proficiency in SQL and Python/PySpark; performance tuning for large-scale datasets

  • Proven experience designing secure data platforms with privacy, retention, and access controls

  • Hands-on experience with data governance tools and practices (Purview or equivalent)

  • Familiarity with CI/CD, DevOps for data (Azure DevOps/GitHub), and infrastructure-as-code (Bicep/Terraform)

  • Excellent communication and storytelling skills to bridge technical and business audiences

  • High integrity and confidentiality in handling sensitive business matter

Preferred Qualifications

  • Microsoft certifications (e.g., DP-203, DP-600, AZ-305)

  • Experience with event streaming (Event Hubs/Service Bus), MDM, and reference data solutions

  • Exposure to legacy interoperability (.NET/C#, SSIS/SSRS, SSAS/Tabular)