Lead Data Architect (Google spanner) (San Jose)

Location: - San Jose, CA / Scottsdale, AZ

Job Description:

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 & Modelling

• Define the Logical Canonical Data Model (LCDM) independent of physical storage.

• Design Spanner-native physical schemas:

• Primary key strategy
• Row key distribution (hotspot avoidance)
• Interleaving decisions
• Secondary index strategy

• Decide where denormalization, projections, or materialized views are required.

Transaction & Consistency Design

• Define transaction boundaries under Spanner constraints:

• Single-partition vs multi-partition transactions
• 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:

• CRUD contracts
• Query semantics
• Transaction invariants

• Review and sign off on schema compatibility scorecards.

Performance & Scalability

• Participate in workload replay analysis.

• Diagnose and resolve:

• Hot key risks
• Transaction conflicts
• 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:

• TrueTime
• Distributed transactions
• Synchronous replication

• Experience designing petabyte-scale, multi-region OLTP systems

• Strong understanding of:

• Distributed consistency models
• Failure modes in globally distributed databases

• Prior Oracle → distributed DB migration experience strongly preferred