Data Architect Jobs: What Is a Data Architect?

The need for data science professionals is at an all-time high. Companies, both large and small, are clamoring for the best talent in the market to support them efficiently capture, process, and analyze large data sets. While more inadequate companies are just being turned on to the potential of data analytics, larger companies have several various sources of data and a large amount of data activity. As revealed in a study by McKinsey, high-performing companies place critical importance on this wealth of data to drive decision-making at various levels of the organization. Data is the backbone of modern management and strategy.

One of the most in-demand jobs within data science is that of the data architect. Companies looking to achieve any robust data strategy need a data architect who knows their way around large-scale databases, data analysis, and machine learning using programming languages. These kinds of companies also need the data architect to help them figure out how the data, both structured and unstructured, should be stored and how it should be integrated with different IT systems.

What Is a Data Architect?

To get the role of a data architect, it is helpful to look at the two other leading roles within data management and business analysis and see how they are differentiated from each other. Those professional data roles are the data scientist and data engineer.

The data engineer has a background in software engineering and works with big data in data lakes, cloud platforms, and data warehouses in the cloud. Data engineering develops and maintains data frameworks.

The data architect knows both software engineering and statistics. Their job is to conceptualize and reflect data frameworks and provide knowledge and guidance in handling disparate data sources from various databases.

The data architect is an indispensable part of any enterprise company’s data science team. They have a holistic concept of the company’s architecture: the data architect plans and runs databases. The study is data infrastructure and develops a new design to integrate current systems with a wanted future state. The data engineer then develops, tests, and manages data pipelines and architectures. The data scientist will then utilize that data for analysis and to produce metrics.

Data architects usually start as data engineers to gain database architecture experience and gather skills in the information technology sector and related fields. A data architect job description will call for proven experience in data analysis and management, with exceptional analytical and problem-solving abilities.

What Are the Functions of Data Architecture?

Data architecture refers to designing various data systems within an organization and the rules that dictate how the data is collected and stored. The data architecture plan acts as a vision or model for future interactions between data systems.

Here are the main functions of data architecture and how the data architect’s role compares to them:

To Define Information Conditions within an Enterprise

The data architect works with business managers and data science teams to collect information elements, translate them, and use them to develop data-centric solutions. To create those solutions, the data architect builds a roadmap for how the data within an enterprise will be used, how it will flow, and how it will be used by different business and IT customers.

To Adhere to Architecture Standards

Much like the physical design industry, there are a set of industry-accepted data architecture laws and rules that must be followed when modeling a database. These standards govern modern data architecture, assure that the data meets regulation and security needs, and assists in achieving the business's goals.

Part of this includes the data architect documenting data inventory and data flow diagrams to discover what can be measured, when, and how.

To Focus on Improving Data Quality, Convenience, And Security

Once the data architecture has been drawn up, the job does not stop there. A data architect must guarantee data structures comply with all local, state, federal, and industry standards and regulations. This provides best practices of data architecture enforced by the data governance committee. They also streamline data flows and models while increasing flexibility, quality, convenience, and security. Data architects study the databases and their combinations and continually look for means to eliminate unnecessary costs and optimize database activity across its objectives.

Finally, the data architect supports the operational management of data for business method functions and the departments that rely on the data, such as customer centricity, supply chain, product positioning, and sales performance.

Data Architecture Jobs

Data architects often start as data engineers to gain experience before becoming data architects. Data architects are important figures within a data science team and predominantly work within large companies dealing with large amounts of data from several sources.

The data architect will work with management, computer engineers, and other data science professionals to evaluate a company's information needs and create systems that help a company optimize its data.

A large part of their job is collecting information from various groups, such as managers, marketing professionals, and other IT professionals, to get the organization's data needs and clearly define the expectations and limitations. Therefore, data architects have to be good communicators.

They also have to be analytical thinkers and creative problem solvers, as they are always looking for recommendations too big and small issues. Any data architect job description will also eligible list good time-management skills as they must figure out priorities and make sure there is sufficient time to achieve them.

Average Data Architect Salaries

The average big data architect salary will depend on where the job is located, what works the candidate has, and how many years of experience. Other related jobs require the same skill set as a data architect but have a higher average salary. Those jobs are cloud data architect, principal solutions architect, remote solutions architect, chief software architect, and IT data architect.