Senior Snowflake Architect / Developer – Higher Education

Attain Partners is seeking a Senior Snowflake Architect / Developer to lead the architecture, design, development, and optimization of Snowflake-based data solutions for higher education clients. This role requires someone who can operate as both a solution architect and hands-on developer. The individual will lead client discovery and design workshops, assess current-state Snowflake environments, troubleshoot complex technical issues, develop future-state data models and architectures, and directly build and optimize Snowflake solutions. The successful candidate will have prior experience working with higher education institutions and will be comfortable engaging with executive stakeholders, business users, data and analytics teams, application owners, and technical resources. This individual should be able to translate institutional requirements into scalable technical solutions while remaining hands-on throughout implementation.

Required Skills
Strong hands-on experience designing, developing, and supporting solutions within Snowflake.
Ability to serve as both a Snowflake Architect and Snowflake Developer within the same engagement.
Experience designing scalable Snowflake environments, including databases, schemas, virtual warehouses, security models, workload management, and data-sharing patterns.
Advanced SQL development skills, including complex queries, views, stored procedures, functions, and data transformation logic.
Strong experience designing logical, physical, dimensional, and analytical data models.
Ability to design future-state enterprise data models and architectures based on evolving institutional requirements.
Experience developing ETL/ELT pipelines and integrating data from enterprise applications, databases, APIs, cloud platforms, and file-based sources.
Strong troubleshooting skills with the ability to diagnose and resolve Snowflake performance, query, data-load, security, integration, and configuration issues.
Experience with Snowflake performance and cost optimization, including warehouse sizing, workload separation, auto-suspend/resume, resource monitors, and query optimization.
Understanding of Snowflake security capabilities including RBAC, masking policies, row-level security, secure views, and data sharing.
Experience implementing data-quality controls, reconciliation processes, validation routines, exception handling, and monitoring.
Demonstrated experience leading client-facing discovery, requirements, architecture, and technical design workshops.
Ability to translate business requirements into technical architectures, data models, source-to-target mappings, and development specifications.
Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
Prior experience delivering data, analytics, data warehouse, or cloud data platform solutions within higher education.
Ability to independently lead technical workstreams while also collaborating with client and consulting delivery teams.
Desired Skills
Experience working with higher education data domains such as: - Student and academic data - Admissions and enrollment - Advancement and fundraising - Finance - Human resources - Research - Institutional reporting and analytics.
Experience with higher education platforms such as Workday, PeopleSoft, Ellucian Banner, Colleague, Salesforce Education Cloud, Slate, Advancement CRM platforms, or similar enterprise applications.
Experience modernizing legacy enterprise data warehouses into cloud-based Snowflake architectures.
Experience with Snowflake capabilities such as: - Snowpark - Snowpipe - Streams and Tasks - Dynamic Tables - Secure Data Sharing - Snowflake Marketplace - Cortex or other Snowflake AI capabilities.
Experience with orchestration and integration technologies such as Boomi, MuleSoft, Informatica, Azure Data Factory, dbt, Fivetran, Matillion, or similar platforms.
Experience with analytics and visualization platforms such as Power BI or Tableau.
Experience working within Azure, AWS, or GCP cloud ecosystems.
Familiarity with data governance, metadata management, master data management, data quality, and enterprise data architecture principles.
Experience creating architecture diagrams, future-state roadmaps, data models, technical designs, and solution documentation.
Consulting experience working directly with multiple client stakeholders and managing competing technical and business priorities.
Ability to mentor developers, data engineers, analysts, and client technical resources.
Years of Experience
8+ years of professional experience in data engineering, data architecture, data warehousing, analytics, or related data technology roles. 4+ years of hands-on Snowflake architecture and development experience.

Certifications
SnowPro Advanced: Architect, SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer, SnowPro Core.

Additional Requirements

Demonstrated ability to build trusted advisor relationships with clients
Experience supporting sales and business development
Position requires flexibility to travel periodically based on business and client needs