What are the responsibilities and job description for the GCP Data Architect position at Cognizant?
Job Title - GCP Data Architect
Location- 3 days week from - Berkeley Heights, NJ
** Visa independent only**
We are looking for an experienced GCP Data Architect to design, build, and evolve our cloud-native data platform on Google Cloud Platform. You will define the architectural vision for how data flows, is stored, processed, and consumed across the organization — partnering closely with engineering, analytics, and business stakeholders.
This is a high-impact role where your decisions will directly shape the quality, reliability, and scalability of our data infrastructure for years to come.
Responsibilities
- Design and own the end-to-end data architecture on GCP, including ingestion, storage, transformation, and serving layers
- Define standards for data modeling, pipeline design, and data quality across all GCP data products
- Architect solutions using BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, and Looker
- Lead the adoption of best practices for data governance, security, and compliance (PII handling, IAM, VPC-SC)
- Collaborate with data engineering teams to review designs and ensure alignment with the reference architecture
- Evaluate and introduce new GCP-native tools and features to improve platform performance and cost efficiency
- Drive data catalog adoption and metadata management using Dataplex and Data Catalog
- Partner with stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable architectural blueprints
- Mentor engineers and promote architectural thinking across the data organization
Required qualifications
- 7 years in data engineering or data architecture roles
- 4 years of hands-on GCP experience in a production environment
- Deep expertise in BigQuery, including optimization and data modeling
- Strong knowledge of streaming (Dataflow/Pub/Sub) and batch processing patterns
- Experience with dbt, Apache Beam, or Spark on GCP
- Proficiency in SQL and Python
- Familiarity with Terraform or other IaC tools for GCP
- Strong understanding of data mesh, data lakehouse, or medallion architectures