Lead Data Architect

Lead Data Architect Want to help us help others? We're hiring GoFundMe is the world's most powerful community for good, dedicated to helping people help each other. By uniting individuals and nonprofits in one place, GoFundMe makes it easy and safe for people to ask for help and support causesfor themselves and each other. Together, our community has raised more than $40 billion since 2010. We are seeking a Lead Data Architect to join our Data Platform team. This role will be pivotal in modernizing our existing platform and building out a scalable data, reporting and AI architecture to provide scale, enhance product offerings, and meet new business requirements. You will design the blueprint for a modern cloud-native data ecosystem, ensuring it is robust, secure, and future-ready. By establishing standards, optimizing performance, and partnering cross-functionally, you will enable GoFundMe to harness data as a strategic asset that powers insights, innovation, and growth. Candidates considered for this role will be located in the San Francisco, Bay Area. There will be an in-office requirement of 3x a week. The Job: Modernize, optimize and evolve a cloud-native data stack into a scalable, secure and high performing ecosystem such as SQL & NoSQL repositories for diverse workloads Leverage modern data platform principles including lakehouse, data fabric and data mesh architectures to improve scalability, decentralization, governance, and interoperability. Design Scalable Architectures: Build flexible architectures to support analytics, real-time reporting, AI/ML Ops pipelines, feature stores, and graph-based data relationships. Unified Data Platform: Design high performing and cost effective solutions that handle both structured and unstructured data at high volume and high velocity. Establish Modeling Standards: Define enterprise-wide standards for data modeling, semantic layers, and golden datasets to enable consistency and reuse. Advance Governance & Quality: Implement frameworks for data lineage, quality, privacy, and security (GDPR, CCPA, PII protections). Enable Personalization & Insights: Architect data capabilities that fuel advanced recommendations, relationship mapping, and connected user experiences. Evaluate & Integrate Technologies: Guide adoption of best-fit technologies to support evolving use cases in data science, AI, and scalable analytics. Partner Cross-Functionally: Collaborate with engineering, product, analytics, and data science teams to translate business vision into technical solutions. Mentor & Lead: Provide architectural leadership, coaching engineers on best practices while influencing strategic platform decisions. You: 10+ years of experience in data architecture, platform engineering, or data engineering, with at least 3+ in a senior or architect role. Proven expertise with modern cloud-native data stacks including Snowflake, Databricks, MDM, Data Catalogs and CDPs. Hands-on experience with Looker or other BI/semantic modeling tools. Strong understanding of graph-based data models, recommendation systems, and personalization architectures. Expertise in data modeling, metadata management, and semantic layers. Proficiency with streaming/event-driven data pipelines and real-time processing (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Spark Streaming, etc.). Familiarity with AI/ML pipelines, feature stores, and unstructured/structured data integration. Strong foundation in data governance, lineage, cataloging, and compliance frameworks. Excellent communication and leadership skills to align technical direction across diverse teams Why Youll Love It Here: Make an Impact: Be part of a mission-driven organization making a positive difference in millions of lives every year. Innovative Environment: Work with a diverse, passionate, and talented team in a fast-paced, forward-thinking atmosphere. Collaborative Team: Join a fun and collaborative team that works hard and celebrates success together. Competitive Benefits: Enjoy competitive pay and comprehensive healthcare benefits. Holistic Support: Enjoy financial assistance for things like hybrid work, family planning, along with generous parental leave, flexible time-off policies, and mental health and wellness resources to support your overall well-being. Growth Opportunities: Participate in learning, development, and recognition programs to help you thrive and grow. Commitment to DEI: Contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion through ongoing initiatives and employee resource groups. Community Engagement: Make a difference through our volunteering and Gives Back programs. We live by our core values: impatient to be great, find a way, earn trust every day, fueled by purpose. Be a part of something bigger with us GoFundMe is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that actively pursues candidates of diverse backgrounds and experiences. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, nationality or national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, pregnancy status, marital status, age, medical condition, mental or physical disability, or military or veteran status. The total annual salary for this full-time position is $253,500 - $380,500 + equity + benefits. As this is a hybrid position, the salary range was determined by role, level, and possible location across the US. Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range based on your location during the hiring process.