Staff Data Architect (CNN Data Analytics, Science & Insights)

Join CNN as a Staff Data Architect, where you'll play a critical role in evolving and strengthening our modern data ecosystem. In this hands-on position, you'll design and implement scalable data architecture patterns, lead the technical design of complex data systems, and define secure data access patterns. You'll also partner closely with platform engineering and analytics teams to improve system reliability and operational efficiency. This role is ideal for someone passionate about improving time-to-insight and building trusted semantic data models across a high-impact analytics platform.

• Design and implement scalable data architecture patterns on Snowflake to support high-volume event and analytics workloads, focusing on performance, security, and cost efficiency.
• Lead the technical design and implementation of complex data systems and platform enhancements, establishing and maintaining architecture and data modeling standards.
• Act as a technical mentor and thought leader, helping grow the skills of engineers and analysts and raising the overall bar for data architecture and engineering practices.

• 5–8 years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or a related field, with demonstrated ownership of production data systems or platform components
• Strong experience designing and maintaining dbt‑based transformation workflows, including testing, performance optimization, and deployment best practices
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non‑technical audiences, influence architectural decisions, and build alignment across teams
• Deep expertise in cloud data warehousing, with hands‑on experience in Snowflake, including performance tuning, security design, cost optimization, and large‑scale data modeling
• Proven ability to design and implement semantic layers and analytics‑ready data models that serve as a trusted source of truth for BI tools such as Looker, Tableau, or Domo
• Experience working with event or clickstream data, ideally using Snowplow or comparable technologies, and a strong understanding of instrumentation and processing challenges at scale
• This role is ideal for someone passionate about improving time‑to‑insight, driving metric consistency, and building trusted semantic data models across a high‑impact analytics platform
• Experience with data orchestration tools such as Airflow or Dagster
• Experience with Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
• Experience working in the media, publishing, or digital content industry
• Familiarity with data privacy and compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, CCPA)