About the Role
The Senior Data Architect is responsible for designing data platforms and lakehouses for customers and ensuring optimal performance and stability for workloads running on Cloudera. This role serves as the technical authority for Cloudera engagements, from presales and sizing through delivery and optimization, within the Data & AI business unit, specifically in the Data Engineering & Management stream. The Senior Data Architect works closely with customer architects, stakeholders, delivery teams, platform administrators, and Cloudera, providing direction on architecture, sizing, workload optimization, and technical leadership. This position also involves building the practice through mentoring engineers and administrators and developing reference architectures, tuning playbooks, and sizing tools. The position is Senior / Lead level and offers a flexible location not limited to KSA.
Ready to apply for roles like this?
Unlock the company name and direct application link. Subscribers get instant access to fresh jobs across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, many with visa support.
Unlock employer & apply directly
Responsibilities
Data Architecture
- Design end-to-end data architectures covering ingestion, storage, processing, serving, and governance layers for analytics and AI use cases.
- Define data models, lakehouse layering, table formats, and data lifecycle and retention strategies.
- Make informed technology choices and trade-offs, including batch vs streaming, lake vs warehouse, and on-prem vs hybrid.
- Establish architecture standards, patterns, and data contracts that delivery teams adhere to.
Cloudera Platform & Workload Optimization
- Architect and size Cloudera Data Platform environments (CDP Private Cloud Base and Data Services), including topology, capacity, and high availability.
- Diagnose and optimize workloads on Cloudera, including Spark, Hive, and Impala query tuning; YARN resource management and queuing; file layout, partitioning, and compaction; and contention under mixed workloads.
- Enhance the stability and speed of ingestion and processing pipelines, and effectively manage latency and SLAs.
- Plan for capacity and growth, determining when to tune, re-architect, or scale out.
- Guide platform security and governance design (Kerberos, Ranger, Atlas) with the administration team.
- Provide technical direction on upgrades and migrations.
Presales & Customer Leadership
- Draft the architecture and Cloudera sections of proposals, size licenses and infrastructure, and estimate effort.
- Conduct platform health checks and performance assessments as part of client engagements.
- Present to customer architects and stakeholders, serving as the technical counterpart to Cloudera.
Practice Building
- Mentor engineers and administrators.
- Develop reference architectures, tuning playbooks, and sizing tools.
Success in the First 12 Months
- Acts as the named architect on all active Cloudera engagements.
- Delivers measurable workload performance improvements for at least one customer platform.
- Publishes a Cloudera reference architecture, a tuning playbook, and a sizing toolkit for bids.
Our Culture & Code of Conduct
We take pride in a culture built on collaboration, innovation, and uncompromising integrity. We seek individuals who share these values and are committed to customer-centricity and ethical excellence. All employees are expected to uphold our Code of Conduct, which serves as a guiding framework for responsible behavior across everything we do—from teamwork to client and partner engagement.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering and data architecture, with a proven track record of designing enterprise data platforms.
- Strong hands-on Cloudera experience (CDH and/or CDP) in production, with a history of tuning and optimizing workloads.
- In-depth knowledge of distributed processing and query engines (Spark, Hive, Impala) and resource management (YARN).
- Solid foundation in data modeling and lakehouse or warehouse design principles.
- Experience with both batch and streaming ingestion (e.g., Kafka, NiFi, CDC).
- Ability to lead technically and articulate trade-offs to customers.
- Familiarity with open table formats (Iceberg) and federated query engines (e.g., Trino) is advantageous.
- Exposure to other data platforms (cloud data platforms, enterprise warehouses) to objectively position Cloudera is a plus.
- Experience designing data platforms for AI/ML consumption is beneficial.
- Proficient in English; Arabic is a plus.
- Cloudera certifications are preferred.
