Lead Data Architect (Google spanner)
clifyxSan Jose, CA
About the role
Job Description:
- Lead Data Architect (Google spanner)
- 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 & Modeling
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 DesignDefine 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:
- TrueTimeDistributed 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
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JOB OVERVIEW
Experience level
Manager
Location
San Jose, CA
Occupation
Database Architects
Industry
Computer Systems Design Services
Posted
today
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