Data Platform Solution Architect in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at Kuvare

About Kuvare

Kuvare is on a mission to serve hardworking consumers overwhelmed by the complexities of retirement and is built from the ground up to do so. Our unified financial hub protects the retirement of everyday Americans and the distributors, carriers and investors that serve them. We create life insurance and annuity products that protect consumers’ retirements, and are simplified for distributor partners and financial professionals to sell and service.

Kuvare family of companies:

Retail Annuity and Life Insurance Solutions:
- United Life Insurance Company
- Guaranty Income Life Insurance Company
- Lincoln Benefit Life

Institutional Insurance:
- Kuvare Life Re

Bespoke Insurance Solutions:
- Ignite Partners

About the role

The person who enters this role will be the Leader and Technical Authority for Kuvare’s Enterprise Data Platform. As a Senior Individual Contributor, the Technical Lead will define the direction for Data and Solution Architecture, make final technical decisions, and ensure the platform scales reliably on Azure. The Technical Lead will translate business objectives into executable architecture, clearly articulating tradeoffs in cost, risk, performance, and delivery timelines. The Technical Lead will partner closely with a Technical Product Owner and Scrum Master to ensure planning and delivery success. This is an individual contributor role. Leadership will only be exercised through technical guidance and mentorship, not direct reports. This leader will bring transformational change to the way Kuvare ingests, houses, and analyzes data to support the enterprise.

What you'll do

· Own end-to-end data and solution architecture for ingestion, transformation, storage, modeling, governance, and access.

· Collaborate with Technical Product Owner, Architects, and other Engineers to define and plan optimizations to existing and new functionality.

· Influence the technical roadmap and improvement of the data platform, balancing delivery needs with long-term architectural considerations.

· Lead reviews for designs, code, pipelines, and infrastructure as code and close risks early.

· Build and evolve Kuvare’s Data Platform on Azure using ADF or Fabric, Databricks or Synapse, SQL, and ADLS.

· Drive CI/CD, Git strategy, and release quality in Azure DevOps; apply infrastructure-as-code principles.

· Partner with Architecture, Engineering Teams, QA, and Security to align solutions and unblock dependencies.

· Collaborate with Technical Product Owner to shape backlog items and uphold Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.

· Own team capability growth and track results.

· Grow team capability through mentoring, technical guidance, and measurable improvements in reliability and flow.

Qualifications

· 10+ years in Software or Data Engineering, including 3+ years in a Senior, Lead, or Architecture role, and at least 5 years of strong SQL experience.

· Experience in Kafka and/or similar technologies, Data Mesh and Event Driven Patterns, and Event Orchestration

· Experience with scalable ELT / ETL pipelines, metadata stores, API Integrations, pipeline automations)

· Proven experience designing and evolving data platforms and architectures while using Azure.

· Experience in an application development context using programming languages like C#, Java, Go, or Python

· Experience with Service Oriented Architecture patterns

· Strong depth of data technology experience and knowledge across Azure ADF or Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, or Synapse, SQL, and ADLS.

· Experience with polyglot data architectures and data structures like key/value, document, and index-based data stores. (MongoDB, Elastic, Redis, etc)

· Solid DevOps proficiency: Azure DevOps, Git, CI/CD, artifact management, and IaC.

· Practical solution architecture skills, pattern fluency, and Agile delivery experience.

· Clear, calm communicator who documents decisions and collaborates effectively.

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