Senior Data Architect (Contract)
Engagement: Data Strategy & AI Enablement Location: Remote
About Meaningful AI
Meaningful AI helps organizations unlock the value in their data. We design and build AI-driven data platforms, taking clients from raw, undocumented data environments through to canonical models, semantic layers, and analytics-ready infrastructure.
What You'll Do
Design canonical data models for core business domains
Discover and interpret schemas across complex legacy datasets (like Databricks)
Reverse-engineer existing data structures and infer relationships across systems
Establish standardized naming conventions, data definitions, and source-to-canonical mappings
Collaborate with client data teams to understand data structures, calculated fields, and transformation logic
Design semantic layers and data governance frameworks
Provide architectural direction for downstream data models
Advise on ML-ready data products
What We're Looking For
Required:
Strong data modeling and schema design experience (conceptual, logical, physical)
Experience with Databricks and/or Spark-based data platforms
Demonstrated ability to reverse-engineer undocumented schemas and infer entity relationships
Experience building canonical or enterprise data models in complex, multi-source environments
Semantic layer design experience (ideally with Power BI as the downstream consumer)
Comfortable working with business stakeholders to define data definitions and governance policies
Eager to learn AI tooling
Strongly Preferred:
Experience in regulated industries with complex data environments
Experience with Medallion Architecture (bronze/silver/gold patterns)
Familiarity with enterprise transaction and accounting systems
Experience with modern AI tool sets
Environment
Our client environments are managed with strict security controls and restricted internet access.
You should be comfortable working within enterprise security constraints.
Deploy is OpenAI's forward deployed engineering division that partners with organizations to solve high-impact problems using AI in real-world environments. The team works directly with customers starting from first principles to deploy AI systems for complex use cases, moving organizations from experimentation to reliable production deployment. Deploy has partnered with major enterprises like BBVA and John Deere to build AI-native solutions, such as AI-powered recommendations that helped farmers reduce chemical usage by 70% and increase customer engagement 6x. Through solving specific customer problems, Deploy identifies repeatable patterns that evolve into product capabilities including Agent SDK, AI-assisted authoring systems, and model benchmarking tools.
