Senior Data Architect / Consultant (Snowflake or Databricks)

About 8 West Consulting

8 West Consulting provides consultancy services and software solutions to clients across the US, Europe and the UK. We work in sectors including insurance, healthcare and retail, helping organisations tackle complex technology challenges and modernise critical platforms.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a senior, client-facing Data Architect / Consultant with deep production experience in either Snowflake or Databricks. You will help enterprise clients modernise data estates, define target architectures and deliver migrations and data engineering solutions that create measurable business value.

This is a long-term role across multiple client engagements. You will combine hands-on technical judgement with clear advice to business and technology leaders, help teams make informed platform decisions and identify further opportunities in data sharing, analytics, AI and data products.

Key Responsibilities

•  Advise business and technology leaders. Lead discovery workshops, clarify priorities and explain architectural options, risks and investment choices in language that supports executive decisions.

•  Shape enterprise data architecture. Assess legacy estates and design appropriate warehouse or lakehouse platforms, integration patterns, migration stages and target operating arrangements.

•  Lead data migration and integration. Guide ETL/ELT, batch and incremental ingestion, change data capture, orchestration, reconciliation, testing and production cutover.

•  Stay close to technical delivery. Review and troubleshoot SQL, pipelines, data models and integrations; address reliability, performance and cost rather than stopping at high-level recommendations.

•  Design trustworthy data layers. Apply sound data modelling and medallion (Bronze / Silver / Gold) patterns where appropriate, with clear data quality, lineage, security and lifecycle controls.

•  Enable secure sharing and data products. Design governed exchange between organisations; assess sharing, private exchange and Marketplace options and commercially viable data offerings.

•  Deliver with enterprise discipline. Own roadmaps, dependencies, architecture decisions and stakeholder updates, keeping complex programmes on track and documenting risks and trade-offs.

•  Develop long-term client value. Transfer knowledge, mentor delivery teams and identify further consulting opportunities in platform engineering, governance, analytics and AI.

Essential Skills & Experience

•  Platform expertise: Snowflake OR Databricks. Significant hands-on experience designing, implementing or migrating production enterprise workloads on at least ONE of these platforms is essential. Expertise in both is not required.

•  Snowflake pathway (one option). For Snowflake specialists: strong experience with platform architecture, data loading and ELT, warehouse performance and cost, security and relevant capabilities such as Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks, Dynamic Tables, secure sharing or Marketplace listings.

•  Databricks pathway (alternative option). For Databricks specialists: strong experience with lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake, Spark/PySpark or Databricks SQL, Unity Catalog, and relevant ingestion/orchestration capabilities such as Lakeflow, Auto Loader, Delta Sharing or Marketplace.

•  Enterprise data migration and engineering. Proven delivery across complex sources, source-to-target mapping, ETL/ELT, pipeline orchestration, data quality, reconciliation and controlled production transition.

•  Advanced SQL and modelling. Strong SQL expertise across relational platforms such as SQL Server, Oracle or PostgreSQL; experience with dimensional and layered/medallion data models, query tuning and transformation logic.

•  Governance and data products. Practical understanding of access control, lineage, auditability and sensitive data, plus governed sharing and the business opportunities created by reusable data products.

•  Senior client advisory. Able to lead workshops, challenge assumptions constructively and present technical strategy and delivery recommendations to business executives and engineering leaders.

•  Enterprise delivery ownership. Demonstrable experience leading significant data initiatives through discovery, architecture, planning and implementation, managing dependencies, milestones and stakeholder expectations.

Desirable Experience

•  Experience across both platforms. Familiarity with Snowflake and Databricks, or experience transferring data workloads between modern cloud data platforms, would be an advantage.

•  Wider cloud migration. AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud migration experience; relevant cloud certifications or experience with structured migration programmes.

•  Analytics and business intelligence. Data analysis, semantic models, dashboards or tools such as Power BI and Tableau; translating business questions into trusted datasets.

•  AI, data science and regulated industries. Enabling governed data for ML/LLM applications or evaluations, and/or experience with insurance, healthcare or other regulated organisations.

•  Supporting tools and qualifications. Python, dbt, Airflow or equivalent orchestration tools; relevant SnowPro, Databricks, AWS, Azure or other cloud/data credentials.

Personal Profile

You are a structured, credible and pragmatic consultant who enjoys solving difficult data problems. You can work from strategic discovery through technical delivery, communicate clearly with senior stakeholders and build confidence in engineering teams. You take ownership of plans and risks, adapt to different client environments and recognise opportunities to create longer-term value.

What Success Looks Like

Clients gain clear architecture decisions, achievable migration roadmaps and reliable production data platforms. Well-governed pipelines, data models and sharing solutions support analytics and future AI use cases. 8 West builds trusted client relationships, delivers predictably and develops repeatable data consulting capability across Snowflake and Databricks engagements.