Information Architect

Job title: Information Architect

About the Role As an Information Architect, you will lead and contribute to data modelling, semantic modelling, and AI-enabled data product development, aligning with Northern Trust's data mesh and medallion architectures.

What You'll Do

• Lead and contribute with conceptual, logical, and physical data model design aligned to the firm's data mesh and medallion architectures.
• Govern and maintain the enterprise data model library in SqlDBM, enforcing naming conventions, domain standards, and versioning.
• Define and steward canonical data entities and lineage across source, integration, and consumption layers.
• Translate business requirements into rigorous data structures in collaboration with engineering and domain teams.
• Guide teams on the design and effective use of semantic data models, including their application to agentic AI solutions.
• Integrate semantic layers with business glossaries, data catalogues, and lineage tooling.
• Design and maintain semantic models to support agentic-AI capabilities.
• Develop ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies underpinning enterprise metadata and search.
• Define semantic modelling standards and patterns to ensure consistent meaning, interoperability, and AI readiness across data products.
• Guide and control the creation of data domains that align with the bank's underlying capabilities.
• Design data product schemas across Snowflake and Databricks, including Delta Lake structures and access patterns.
• Define and enforce architectural guardrails for data product design, including performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Set design standards and review transformation/pipelines for compliance.
• Embed data contract standards and data quality frameworks across pipeline outputs.
• Leverage Snowflake Cortex / Databricks Genie (or similar) to deliver natural language query and LLM-augmented data products.
• Utilize GitHub Copilot (or similar) to accelerate modelling, documentation, and pipeline development.
• Design and define a set of agentic skills that can be provided to implementation teams.
• Contribute to the firm's AI Champion network, evaluating emerging capabilities and advising on adoption.
• Act as a design authority for data architecture across teams and data domains.
• Partner with enterprise, security, and risk architecture to ensure data solutions align with broader technology and regulatory standards.
• Provide early-stage architectural input to initiative discovery and solution design to reduce delivery risk.
• Present architecture decisions to senior stakeholders, architecture review boards, and regulatory audiences.
• Support regulatory compliance through robust lineage, metadata management, and data quality evidence.
• Mentor junior architects and engineers within the Information Architecture community of practice.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience in data architecture, data engineering, or information management.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven enterprise data modelling experience at conceptual, logical, and physical levels.
• Hands-on SqlDBM experience (or equivalent modern toolset).
• Proven experience with dbt (dbt Labs).
• Good Python skills, API integration, automation.
• Practical Snowflake and Databricks experience including Cortex AI and Genie.
• Working knowledge of OWL, RDF, SPARQL and enterprise ontology design.
• Experience with at least one agentic AI framework.
• GitHub Copilot or equivalent AI coding assistant experience in a professional setting.
• Financial services background preferred; BCBS 239 awareness advantageous.

Nice to Have

• Data Vault 2.1 alongside Kimball/Star-schema modelling.
• Data mesh, data product ownership and federated governance.
• Knowledge graph platforms (Neo4j, Neptune) or knowledge of OWL, RDF and exposure to and build of ontologies.
• Published thought leadership or community contributions in data or AI.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range: USD 137,400 – 240,400 per year.
• Comprehensive benefits package including retirement benefits (401k and pension), health and welfare benefits (medical, dental, vision, spending accounts and disability), paid time off, parental and caregiver leave, life & accident insurance, and other voluntary and well-being benefits.
• Discretionary bonus program that may include an equity component.