Data Architect

Overview

About Suffolk

Suffolk is a national enterprise that builds, innovates and invests. Suffolk is an end-to-end business that provides value throughout the entire project lifecycle by leveraging its core construction management services with vertical service lines that include real estate capital investment, design, self-perform construction services, technology start-up investment (Suffolk Technologies) and innovation research/development.

Suffolk – America’s Contractor – is a national company with more than $5.0 billion in annual revenue, 2,600 employees, and main offices in Boston (headquarters), New York City, Miami, West Palm Beach, Tampa, Estero, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. Suffolk manages some of the most complex, sophisticated projects in the country, serving clients in every major industry sector, including healthcare, life sciences, education, gaming, transportation/aviation, government, mission critical and commercial. Suffolk is privately held and is led by founder, chairman and CEO John Fish. Suffolk is ranked #8 on ENR’s list of “Top CM-at-Risk Contractors.” For more information, visit www.suffolk.com and follow Suffolk on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

At Suffolk, we believe that our total rewards program should offer you and your family the support you need when it matters most. That’s why we have created a program that provides employees with access to a wide variety of options that can be personalized to support you and your loved ones physically, emotionally, and financially.

Benefits include, competitive salaries, auto allowances and gas cards for certain roles, access to market leading medical and emotional and mental health benefits, dental, and vision insurance plans, virtual care options for physical therapy and primary care, generous paid time off, 401k plan with employer match and access to expert financial resources, company paid and voluntary life insurance, tax deferred savings accounts, 10 backup daycare days each year, short- and long-term disability, commuter benefits and more.  For more information, click here.

Role Summary

Suffolk is scaling its Data and AI team to deliver real-time, predictive insights across the build lifecycle. We’re hiring a hands-on Data Architect to design, build, and operate the semantic layer, automated data quality controls (including AI-assisted checks), lineage, and access patterns that make our data discoverable, trusted, secure, and agentic AI ready. Reporting to the Director of Data Management, this individual will create reusable models/metrics, embed governance as code, and ensure every data product meets targets for reliability, availability, and semantic interoperability.

Responsibilities

Evolve lakehouse and platform architecture

• Own the target architecture for Databricks on AWS (S3/EC2, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow/Model Registry, Delta Live Tables) and the interfaces to Agentic AI stack/BI/IDE and downstream apps
• Design ingestion and serving patterns, data contracts, and API/SQL access layers for internal consumers and agentic use cases
• Plan platform evolution (governed multi-workspace layout, environment separation, lineage/observability) and drive high-impact upgrades and migrations with low downtime
• Champion IaC & CI/CD (e.g., Terraform GitHub Actions) for reproducible workspaces, catalogs, pipelines, and policies

Evolve enterprise data catalog, lineage & semantic layer

• Deploy and maintain data catalog across Databricks
• Build & evolve the semantic layer - design subject area models, define conformed dimensions and governed metrics, and expose them for BI, APIs, and AI agents
• Extract business rules currently embedded in dashboards / SQL and refactor them into reusable transformations, tests, and metric definitions
• Implement and maintain lineage, technical and business metadata, and documentation across Databricks Unity Catalog; ensure LLM-friendly metadata for RAG and AI agents
• Lead scaling of the Master data (Project, Vendor, Budget, People etc.) and golden record rules

Implement automated data-quality & reliability controls

• Embed rule-based and ML anomaly tests into pipelines and semantic layer
• Define and monitor SLAs (latency ≤ 15 min, uptime ≥ 99 %) with incident playbooks
• Drive continuous improvement to cut quality issues by 90 % year-over-year

Operationalize security & privacy by design for analytical data stack

• Partner with CISO to maintain security of cloud infrastructure for analytics and AI
• Develop and implement data classification and access framework
• Own annual assessments and audits for analytical data stack
• Ensure adherence to all applicable data regulations and policies

Build model & AI governance framework

• Establish model registry, bias/drift monitoring, and audit trails for all predictive and GenAI models
• Partner with Data Science to integrate governance checkpoints into pipelines

Drive adoption & data literacy

• Champion “data-as-a-service” culture—making trusted data and insights the default for project teams

Qualifications

• 5 years in data architecture/engineering within a modern cloud stack; 2 years owning a semantic/metrics layer at scale
• Strong SQL/Python with Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow/Model Registry; experience with Delta Live Tables (or equivalent) for transformations
• Proven track record standing up enterprise catalog/lineage and data quality automation
• Working knowledge of access control patterns, data classification, and PII protections in analytical stacks; partners effectively with security teams
• Excellent stakeholder skills, able to translate governance concepts to the broader teams

Working Conditions

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit for long periods of time; talk or hear; perform fine motor, hand and finger skills in the use of a keyboard, telephone, or writing. The employee is frequently required to stands; walk; and reach with arms and/or hands. Specific vision abilities include close vision, distance vision, depth perception and the ability to adjust focus. The employee will spend their time in an office environment with a quiet to moderate noise level. Job site walking.

EEO Statement

Suffolk provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, national origin, citizenship, genetic information, disability, protected veteran, gender identity, age or any other status protected by law.  This policy applies to recruiting, hiring, transfers, promotions, terminations, compensation, benefits, and all other terms and conditions of employment.  Suffolk will not tolerate any unlawful discrimination toward, or harassment of, applicants or employees by anyone at Suffolk, or anyone working on behalf of Suffolk.

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