Lead Data Architect (Google spanner)
Description
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.
• Diagnose and resolve:
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
• Strong understanding of:
o Distributed consistency models
o Failure modes in globally distributed databases
• Prior Oracle → distributed DB migration experience strongly preferred