Data Architect

Skill Category

Core Competency

Required / Preferred

Strategic Value to the Department

Experience (Years)

Orchestration & ETL

Azure Data Factory (ADF)

Required

Pipelines, Mapping Data Flows, Integration Runtimes (Self-Hosted/Azure), CI/CD parameterization, REST API triggers.

Data Warehousing

Snowflake

Required

Multi-cluster virtual warehouses, zero-copy cloning, Snowpipe, Time Travel, RBAC, cost optimization, and micro-partitioning.

Relational & SQL

T-SQL / Azure SQL / Synapse

Required

Complex indexing, execution plan tuning, partitioning, stored procedures, CTEs, dynamic SQL, and window functions.

Analytics & BI

Power BI

Preferred

DAX, Star Schema modeling, Composite Models, DirectQuery over Snowflake/Synapse, Row-Level Security (RLS), Service Admin.

Data Lake & Storage

Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS Gen2)

Preferred

Delta Lake format, POSIX access control lists, Lifecycle Management policies, hierarchical namespaces, and zone partitioning.

Big Data Warehousing & Analytics

Snowflake (Snowpark & Streams)

Required

Snowpark (Python/Scala) for scalable data engineering and ML; Streams for CDC; Tasks for orchestration; Time Travel & RBAC for governance; credit-aware cost optimization with multi-cluster virtual warehouses.

Governance & Quality

Microsoft Purview

Preferred

Automated lineage tracking, data classification rules, business glossary mapping, and access governance policies.

Data Modeling

ER/Studio, Erwin, or SQLDBM

Required

Conceptual, Logical, and Physical data modeling; Kimball Dimensional Modeling; Data Vault 2.0 methodology.

Infrastructure & DevOps

Terraform / Azure DevOps

Required

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for Azure resources, YAML build/release pipelines, Git workflow management.

Security & Compliance

Azure Key Vault & Entra ID

Required

Private Endpoints, Managed Identities, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), column/row-level encryption.

Security & Governance

Managed Identity, Key Vault, and RBAC

Required

Securing data at rest and in transit using Managed Identity, Key Vault, and RBAC while maintaining automated lineage via Purview.

Semantic Layering

Star/Snowflake schemas

Preferred

Designing enterprise dimensional models optimized for high-performance Power BI DirectQuery and Import models.

Storage & Warehouse Optimization

Azure Data Lake Storage

Preferred

Structuring ADLS Gen2 landing, bronze, silver, and gold zones; configuring Snowflake warehouses for optimal performance and credit control.

End-to-End Pipeline Design

Azure Data Factory

Azure Event Hubs

Snowflake (Snowpipe / Streams / Tasks)

Preferred

Architecting resilient ingestions patterns using ADF for batch loads and Event Hubs for real-time; landing to Snowflake via Snowpipe and Streams, orchestration with Snowflake Tasks and monitoring via query history.