Analytics Platforms Architect

The Role

We're looking for an Analytics Platforms Architect to be the senior technical leader responsible for making Tala's data easier to trust, understand, access, and use across the company.

This is a highly hands-on technical leadership role. You'll define the architecture and technical direction for shared data and analytics platforms while also building alongside our engineers.

You'll work across Product, Analytics, Engineering, Finance, and Accounting to create infrastructure that becomes the foundation for how Tala uses data. A major focus will be building a semantic layer that gives the organization consistent, governed definitions for important business metrics. You'll also help establish how our analytics teams and AI tools safely work with that data.

This isn't an architecture role where you simply create designs and hand them off to someone else. You'll be expected to make technical decisions, write code, build production systems, and drive important platform initiatives through delivery.

Initially, this role is an individual contributor position with no direct reports, operating at a Principal/Staff-level scope. As our platform organization grows, there will be an opportunity to build and lead a team.

What You'll Do:

Own Data Platform Architecture

• Define the technical architecture for Tala's semantic layer and shared analytics platform.
• Establish consistent, governed definitions for business metrics across markets and teams.
• Determine how data and metrics should be stored, modeled, accessed, and consumed across BI tools, notebooks, applications, and AI agents.
• Make architectural decisions that balance scalability, reliability, usability, governance, and regulatory requirements.
• Set technical priorities and sequencing for major platform initiatives and ensure they reach completion.

Build, Don't Just Architect

• Design and build production data models, pipelines, services, tooling, SDKs, and other platform components.
• Partner closely with Analytics Engineering and Data Infrastructure as a senior technical contributor.
• Take ownership of specific platform capabilities from concept through production.
• Identify and eliminate technical debt and architectural bottlenecks that slow down the broader data organization.
• Establish reusable patterns and standards that make it easier for engineers and analysts to work with data.

Build AI-Native Analytics

• Define how Tala's Analytics organization can effectively use AI in everyday workflows, including development, analysis, testing, documentation, and data exploration.
• Build the context and governance layer that enables AI agents to safely work with trusted business metrics and data.
• Establish standards and best practices for using AI across analytics and data workflows.
• Help move AI initiatives from experimentation and prototypes into reliable, adopted tools and processes.

Drive Cross-Functional Data Initiatives

• Lead technical initiatives that span Product, Engineering, Analytics, Finance, and Accounting.
• Bring clarity to ambiguous problems and drive technical decisions to completion.
• Unblock engineers and teams by resolving dependencies, architectural questions, and technical debt.
• Partner with Finance and Accounting to ensure important financial and business metrics reconcile with the company's books and reporting.
• Build strong relationships across teams and influence technical decisions without relying on formal authority.

Raise the Technical Bar

• Provide technical mentorship through design reviews, pairing, and hands-on collaboration.
• Establish engineering and data architecture standards.
• Improve documentation and make data easier for teams to understand and use.
• Help create a culture where governance, reliability, and usability are built into data products from the beginning.

What You'll Need:

• Significant experience in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, data platforms, or a related technical field.
• Experience designing and building large-scale or shared data platforms and infrastructure.
• Strong experience with data architecture, data modeling, pipelines, and production systems.
• A track record of making complex architectural decisions and translating them into working systems.
• The ability and willingness to write production code and build alongside engineers.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without necessarily having direct authority over those teams.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to bring ambiguous or stalled initiatives to completion.
• Experience establishing trusted, governed, or standardized business metrics is highly valuable.
• Experience with AI/LLM-powered analytics, data workflows, or agents is a strong plus.
• Experience working with financial, regulated, or highly sensitive data is a plus.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.