Principal Architect - Snowflake

About Us

Since 1989, SHI International Corp. has helped organizations change the world through technology. We’ve grown every year since, and today we’re proud to be a $16 billion global provider of IT solutions and services.

Over 17,000 organizations worldwide rely on SHI’s concierge approach to help them solve what’s next. But the heartbeat of SHI is our employees – all 7,000 of them. If you join our team, you’ll enjoy:

• Our commitment to diversity, as the largest minority- and woman-owned enterprise in the U.S.

• Continuous professional growth and leadership opportunities.

• Health, wellness, and financial benefits to offer peace of mind to you and your family.

• World-class facilities and the technology you need to thrive – in our offices or yours. 

Job Summary

We are expanding our Snowflake capability within the Data and AI practice, and we are looking for a Principal Solutions Architect to lead the technical side of it.

You will be in front of customers from the start, qualifying opportunities, running technical discovery with customer architects and data leaders, designing target platforms, and owning the technical win. Most of the work in front of us is focused on platform build-out and migration, helping enterprises consolidate onto Snowflake from SAP, Oracle, Teradata, and other established estates. This is where we need the strongest expertise.

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant influence over what we build and sell. It is ideal for someone who wants to shape a capability rather than operate within one that is already established.

Role Description

Own the Technical Side of Snowflake Pursuits

• Lead qualification, discovery, target architecture design, effort and risk sizing, and development of technical content for proposals and Statements of Work (SOWs).

• Build and maintain technical relationships with customer architects and technical stakeholders.

• Provide accurate assessments of migration effort, complexity, and risk, helping customers understand the true scope of their transformation initiatives.

Provide Architectural Oversight Through Delivery

• Review architecture decisions throughout delivery.

• Ensure the delivered solution aligns with what was originally scoped and proposed.

• Identify and address risks or issues early in the project lifecycle.

• Remain engaged in delivery to maintain accountability for the technical solution and outcomes.

Shape Snowflake Service Offerings

• Define the technical content of Snowflake-focused service offerings.

• Establish service scope, success criteria, and measurable outcomes.

• Determine what evidence demonstrates successful delivery.

• Create repeatable frameworks and standards that delivery teams can execute consistently.

Partner with Snowflake

• Collaborate directly with Snowflake field teams and specialist architects on joint customer engagements.

• Build productive relationships with vendor teams while representing the organization’s technical perspective.

• Effectively navigate technical challenges, feedback, and differing viewpoints from Snowflake architects and specialists

Behaviors and Competencies

• Willingness to Learn: Can apply new learning to daily work, encourage and facilitate learning in others, and actively make changes to work based on feedback.

• Self-Development: Can demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning and adaptability to new ideas and methods.

• Leadership: Can take ownership of complex team initiatives, collaborate with others in decision-making processes, and drive team performance.

• Strategic Thinking: Can analyze complex situations, anticipate future trends, and align and integrate strategies across departments or functions.

• Problem-Solving: Can proactively identify and take ownership of complex problem-solving initiatives, initiate preventative measures, collaborate with others to find solutions, and drive successful outcomes.

• Analytical Thinking: Can use advanced analytical techniques to solve complex problems, draw insights, and communicate the solutions effectively.

• Prioritization: Can take ownership of complex task management, collaborate with others to align priorities, and drive team efficiency.

• Customer-Centric Mindset: Can take ownership of customer-centric initiatives, ensuring products and services align with customer needs. Collaborates with cross-functional teams to integrate customer feedback into product development.

• Organization: Can oversee complex projects with multiple moving parts, ensure team alignment with organizational systems, and adapt to changing priorities.

• Communication: Can effectively communicate complex ideas and information to diverse audiences, facilitate effective communication between others, and mentor others in effective communication.

• Interpersonal Skills: Can communicate effectively, build relationships, resolve conflicts, influence others, and support others in developing their interpersonal skills in major situations.

Skill Level Requirements

Platform and Architecture

• Account and environment design

• Warehouse and compute architecture

• Open table format strategy

• Connectivity and data residency design

• Cost architecture decisions that impact long-term scalability and affordability

The ability to design platforms that remain operationally and financially sustainable at scale is critical.

Migration and Consolidation

• Migrating enterprises from SAP, Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, appliance platforms, and increasingly other cloud data warehouses

• Assessments and migration planning

• Wave planning and execution

• Schema and workload conversion

• Reconciliation and parity validation

• Cutover planning and execution

Experience extracting data from tightly licensed ERP environments is highly valuable, including understanding:

• Inherited semantic layers

• Data extraction challenges

• Commercial licensing considerations

This represents the largest body of work anticipated for the practice and requires genuine expertise rather than general familiarity.

Data Engineering and Pipelines

• Data ingestion

• Data transformation

• Pipeline orchestration

• Testing frameworks

• Data quality instrumentation

• Building reliable, production-ready engineering processes rather than proof-of-concept implementations

Semantic and Context Layer

Experience designing and implementing:

• Consistent business definitions that can be used across the organization

• Shared semantic layers consumable by people, BI tools, and AI agents

• Enterprise data models that ensure consistency across downstream consumers

This is an area of increasing investment within Snowflake and an area where many customers require significant guidance.

Governance at the Perimeter

Experience with:

• Data classification

• Access policies

• Data masking

• Lineage management

Candidates should understand how Snowflake governance integrates with enterprise governance frameworks and be able to address governance challenges that cross platform boundaries.

Consumption Economics

Strong understanding of:

• Credit consumption management

• Warehouse sizing

• Workload placement strategies

• Cost optimization and monitoring

Candidates must be able to speak confidently with customers about platform costs and provide practical guidance on maintaining cost efficiency.

Technical Depth Expectations

Candidates do not need to be equally strong across all six areas; however, they must possess:

• Deep expertise in platform architecture

• Deep expertise in migration and consolidation

• Deep expertise in data engineering

• Sufficient proficiency across the remaining areas to identify when specialist support is needed

Other Requirements

Snowflake Expertise

• Substantial hands-on Snowflake experience gained through:

  • A Snowflake partner organization

  • Snowflake directly

  • Managing a significant Snowflake environment internally

• This role requires Snowflake-specific expertise rather than general data platform leadership experience.

Enterprise Migration Experience

• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale migration and consolidation initiatives.

• Ability to discuss at least one major migration engagement in detail, including lessons learned and outcomes.

• Experience moving data from SAP and Oracle environments is particularly valuable.

Principal-Level Technical Leadership

• Demonstrated success operating at Principal Architect level or equivalent.

• Recognized as the senior technical authority in customer engagements.

• Trusted to commit organizations to technical approaches, architectures, and delivery scopes.

Presales Experience

• Experience in presales environments, or

• Delivery leadership experience with demonstrated ability to:

  • Lead customer discussions

  • Define scope and approach

  • Develop proposals and Statements of Work

  • Stand behind commitments made during the sales process

Vendor Collaboration

• Comfortable collaborating with and being challenged by vendor architects and technical specialists.

Certifications

• Snowflake certification preferred.

• Ability to obtain certification quickly if not already certified.

• Certification support and funding are provided

The estimated annual pay range for this position is $195,000 - $250,000 which includes a base salary and bonus. The compensation for this position is dependent on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location and, therefore, will vary from individual to individual. Benefits may include, but are not limited to, medical, vision, dental, 401K, and flexible spending.

Equal Employment Opportunity – M/F/Disability/Protected Veteran Status