Senior Data Architect

The Senior Data Architect is responsible for designing data platforms and lakehouses for ZainTECH’s customers and getting the best performance and stability out of workloads running on Cloudera. The role serves as the technical authority for ZainTECH’s Cloudera engagements, from presales and sizing through delivery and optimisation, within the Data & AI business unit, Data Engineering & Management stream.

Working closely with customer architects and stakeholders, delivery teams, platform administrators and Cloudera, the Senior Data Architect provides architecture direction, platform sizing, workload optimisation and technical leadership. The role also builds the practice by mentoring engineers and administrators and creating reference architectures, tuning playbooks and sizing tools. The position is Senior / Lead level, with a flexible location that is not limited to KSA.

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 sound technology choices and trade-offs, including batch vs streaming, lake vs warehouse, and on-prem vs hybrid.
• Set architecture standards, patterns and data contracts that delivery teams follow.

Cloudera Platform & Workload Optimisation

• Architect and size Cloudera Data Platform environments (CDP Private Cloud Base and Data Services), including topology, capacity and HA.
• Diagnose and optimise workloads on Cloudera, including Spark, Hive and Impala query tuning, YARN resource management and queueing, file layout, partitioning and compaction, and contention under mixed workloads.
• Make ingestion and processing pipelines more stable and faster, and bring latency and SLAs under control.
• Plan capacity and growth, and decide when to tune, re-architect or scale out.
• Guide platform security and governance design (Kerberos, Ranger, Atlas) with the admin team.
• Give technical direction on upgrades and migrations.

Presales & Customer Leadership

• Write the architecture and Cloudera sections of proposals, size licences and infrastructure, and estimate effort.
• Run platform health checks and performance assessments as client engagements.
• Present to customer architects and stakeholders, and act as the technical counterpart to Cloudera.

Practice Building

• Mentor engineers and administrators.
• Build reference architectures, tuning playbooks and sizing tools.

Success in the First 12 Months:

• Is 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:

At ZainTECH, we take pride in a culture built on collaboration, innovation, and uncompromising integrity. We are looking for 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 how we work with each other to how we engage with clients and partners globally.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering and data architecture, with a track record of designing enterprise data platforms.
• Strong hands-on Cloudera experience (CDH and/or CDP) in production, with proven results tuning and optimising workloads on it.
• Deep knowledge of distributed processing and query engines (Spark, Hive, Impala) and of resource management (YARN).
• Solid data modelling and lakehouse or warehouse design fundamentals.
• Experience with both batch and streaming ingestion (e.g. Kafka, NiFi, CDC).
• Ability to lead technically and explain trade-offs to customers.
• Experience with open table formats (Iceberg) and federated query engines (e.g. Trino) is an advantage.
• Exposure to other data platforms (cloud data platforms, enterprise warehouses), so that Cloudera can be positioned objectively, is an advantage.
• Experience designing data platforms for AI/ML consumption is an advantage.
• English at professional level. Arabic is an advantage.
• Cloudera certifications preferred.