Data Architect

SpecialChem (France, US, Japan, India), the world's leading Material Selection Platform, helps millions of engineers every year find materials that solve their technical and sustainability challenges. To accelerate our growth and support the industry's digitalization and sustainability shift, we are building data leadership capabilities in a new European hub.
We are looking for an experienced Data Architect to join our distributed European engineering and data organisation. This is a fully remote role within France, collaborating with a global team of engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders.
What you will do
- Define, own, and evolve the enterprise data architecture supporting analytics, products, AI/ML, and operational use cases.
- Design scalable, secure, and high-performance end-to-end data platform architectures across ingestion, storage, processing, analytics, and data sharing layers.
- Define data modelling standards (conceptual, logical, physical) for structured and semi-structured data across Snowflake and related platforms.
- Act as the architectural authority for data pipelines, integration patterns, APIs, and data consumption use cases.
- Ensure the data platform is designed for security, compliance, availability, performance, and cost efficiency.
- Define and enforce data governance, data quality, metadata, lineage, and master data principles across the organisation.
- Collaborate with Data Engineers to translate architectural designs into robust, maintainable implementations.
- Work with Product, Data, Engineering, and Business teams to align data architecture with product roadmaps and business priorities.
- Define architectural standards and best practices for data sharing, data products, and external data exposure.
- Contribute to the data platform roadmap, evaluating new technologies and guiding adoption decisions.
- Support the Data Director and Executive team with architecture reviews, technical decisions, and long-term data strategy.
Your Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree from a recognised university (Computer Science, Engineering, or related field preferred).
What you will need
- 12–15 years of experience in data, with at least 3–5 years in a Data Architect or Lead Data role.
- Strong experience designing enterprise-scale data platforms and architectures.
- Deep expertise in data modelling, data warehousing, and analytical architectures.
- Advanced SQL knowledge and strong understanding of relational and cloud-native databases.
- Proven experience designing architectures using Snowflake and modern cloud data stacks.
- Strong understanding of data security: dynamic data masking, row-level security, access control, and data sharing.
- Experience with streaming, event-driven architectures, APIs, and integration patterns.
- Familiarity with CI/CD, DevOps, and infrastructure-as-code concepts in data environments.
- Experience performing architecture reviews, trade-off analysis, and technology evaluations.
- Strong understanding of GDPR and data privacy regulations.
- Ability to translate business requirements into scalable and future-proof data designs.
- Excellent communication skills: able to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted design, documentation, and data modelling tools; ability to evaluate and govern AI-generated artefacts in data architecture practices.
Key Technical Skills
- Cloud data platforms: Snowflake
- Data integration tools: Matillion or equivalent
- Programming & scripting: Python, SQL
- APIs & integrations: REST, event-based patterns
- BI & analytics tools: Power BI, Qlik, Tableau
- Enterprise systems exposure: CRM, Marketing Automation, PIM platforms
- Agile methodologies and continuous delivery practices
Personal Skills
- Strong architectural mindset with attention to long-term scalability and maintainability.
- Collaborative leader who can influence without authority.
- Structured, analytical, and business-oriented thinker.
- Comfortable working in a global, cross-functional, and fast-evolving environment.
- Autonomous, proactive, and accountable.
Why join us?
- Best-in-class data and cloud technologies on a genuinely global product used by millions of engineers.
- SpecialChem has 25+ years of leadership in the Materials Selection industry with strong growth momentum.
- Engineering culture focused on quality, ownership, and collaboration — no micromanagement.
- Fully remote within France, working in CET/CEST.
- Occasional travel to Paris office for team events and architecture reviews.
Recruitment Process
- Recruiter screen (30 min video call).
- Introduction call with the Hiring Manager.
- Async take-home technical assignment (3–4 hours).
- Technical interview (60 min) with members of the engineering team.
- Culture and leadership conversation with the CTO.

Work arrangement
Yes