.We're hiring!At Cognizant we have an ideal opportunity for you to be part of one of the largest companies in the digital sector worldwide. A Phenomenal Place to Work where we look for people who give new insights and experience a dynamic and growing environment. At Cognizant we promote an inclusive culture, where we value different perspectives providing career growth and development opportunities. #WelcomeToCognizant!We have a great opportunity for an outstanding individual to work supporting one of our clients as a Platform Data Architect.We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Platform Data Architect to build and maintain our next-generation data platform. This role requires a deep understanding of cloud-native technologies and a strong ability to design solutions that support multiple products and teams within a complex, integrated environment. You will be a key player in defining and implementing our data strategy, ensuring data quality, scalability, and security across our entire platform. This is a hands-on role requiring collaboration with various engineering and product teams.Responsibilities:Implement a scalable, reliable, and secure data platform architecture leveraging cloud-native services (GCP, Fivetran, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, or equivalent).Define and implement data governance policies and procedures, including data quality, security, and access control (e.G., Data Catalog, Collibra, Alation, Dataplex).Optimize SQL queries and database performance across relational and NoSQL databases.Design and implement data warehousing/lakehouse solutions.Clearly articulate chosen platform(s) and technologies.Collaborate with product and engineering teams to capture requirements, translate them into technical specifications, and deliver solutions.Develop and maintain user documentation for the data platform.Mentor and guide junior data engineers and architects.Participate in Agile software development processes.Qualifications:5+ years of experience as a Data Architect, with a minimum of 3 years specifically focused on platform-level data architecture in a microservice or distributed system environment.Extensive experience with cloud-native technologies, specifically GCP, AWS or Azure.Deep understanding and hands-on experience implementing data governance frameworks and using associated tools, e.G. Data Catalog, Collibra, Alation.Proven experience designing backend data solutions for high-performing RESTful APIs.Expert-level proficiency in SQL and database performance tuning across relational (PostgreSQL, MSSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases.Proficiency in at least two programming languages (Java, C#, Python preferred). Shell scripting experience is required.Experience with Big Data technologies and Massively Parallel Processing databases (BigQuery, Snowflake, Synapse).Experience with multi-tenanted data environments.Strong understanding of data modeling techniques (relational, dimensional, NoSQL)