Lead Data Architect (Google spanner)
Own the target-state data architecture on Google Spanner, ensuring the new data model satisfies functional correctness, performance SLOs, and transactional semantics required by 1000+ applications—before large-scale app rewrites occur.
This role is not a schema converter. It is a distributed systems architect role.
Key Responsibilities
Data Architecture & Modeling
- Define the Logical Canonical Data Model (LCDM) independent of physical storage.
- Design Spanner-native physical schemas:
o Primary key strategy
o Row key distribution (hotspot avoidance)
o Interleaving decisions
o Secondary index strategy
- Decide where denormalization, projections, or materialized views are required.
Transaction & Consistency Design
- Define transaction boundaries under Spanner constraints:
o Single-partition vs multi-partition transactions
o Atomicity and consistency trade-offs
- Classify workloads by strong consistency vs bounded staleness tolerance.
- Define idempotency and retry-safe patterns.
Compatibility & Contract Validation
- Work with QA and platform teams to validate:
o CRUD contracts
o Query semantics
o Transaction invariants
- Review and sign off on schema compatibility scorecards.
Performance & Scalability
- Participate in workload replay analysis.
o Hot key risks
o Transaction conflicts
o Index amplification
- Size Spanner instances and estimate cost envelopes.
Leadership
- Act as final authority for Spanner data design decisions.
- Mentor domain architects and engineers.
- Provide executive-level architectural rationale.
Required Skills & Experience
- 10+ years in large-scale data architecture
- Deep expertise in Google Spanner internals:
o TrueTime
o Distributed transactions
o Synchronous replication
- Experience designing petabyte-scale, multi-region OLTP systems
o Distributed consistency models
o Failure modes in globally distributed databases
- Prior Oracle distributed DB migration experience strongly preferred
Salary Range- $120,000-$130,000 a year
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