Senior Data Architect (Ireland)

About Us

Empyrean is the leading risk and finance software and services provider, curating solutions purpose-built for banks and credit unions. Empyrean offers a seamless integration of risk and finance data, eliminating the frustrations associated with feeding data between systems. This unified, integrated approach makes it easy for all your CFO's requirements to be serviced by solutions fed by a singular, reliable source of data. Say goodbye to your treasury, accounting, and finance teams all reporting different versions of the truth.

We're building AI capabilities that go far beyond chatbots bolted onto existing products. Our vision is an Agentic Platform that surfaces intelligent insights, executes autonomous workflows, and enables natural language interaction with complex financial data, all embedded natively into the risk and performance management tools that bank treasurers, CFOs, and risk officers use daily. Think: proactive anomaly detection that triggers downstream actions, intelligent scenario generation for ALM, natural language exploration of deposit behaviour models, and autonomous regulatory report assembly - not a chat window in the corner of the screen. This platform will serve as the AI backbone across Empyrean's product suite: ALM, Liquidity Stress Testing, Deposit Analytics/Model IQ, Profitability, Budgeting & Planning, and CECL.

Role Overview

As Data Architect, you'll lead the design and build-out of Empyrean's data platform that powers risk management, performance management, and regulatory compliance solutions for financial institutions. You'll architect the end-to-end data lifecycle supporting critical banking functions from ALM and liquidity stress testing to profitability analysis and CECL calculations. Your platform will scale from millions of rows monthly today to 100M+ rows daily for tier-1 banks and large credit unions over 2-3 years, all while maintaining the accuracy and reliability required for regulatory reporting and balance sheet management. The position is based out of Cork, Ireland.

Scale Trajectory:

• Current: 2-5M rows/customer monthly

• Year 1: 10-20M rows/customer monthly

• Year 2: 100-200M rows/customer monthly

• Years 2-3: 100-200M rows/customer DAILY

• Maintain sub-second query response across all scales

You'll lead the data platform team (3 Data Engineers, 1 BI Developer, 2 Business Analysts).

What You'll Do

• Platform Architecture: Design scalable Lake House Platform supporting ALM, liquidity, profitability, and planning products with medallion architecture, versioned APIs, and comprehensive cataloging for regulatory compliance

• Platform Philosophy: Drive centralized governance with decentralized product creation through a common data model exposed via versioned APIs, ensuring consistency, interoperability, and self-service adoption across teams

• Technical Leadership: Lead Databricks/Snowflake implementations, partner with risk and performance product teams on data modeling, establish governance frameworks meeting banking regulatory requirements

• Scale & Performance: Architect for 100x+ growth over 2-3 years supporting everything from community banks to tier-1 institutions while ensuring costs scale sub-linearly

• Innovation Enablement: Build self-service capabilities for risk analysts, finance teams, and treasury users, reducing time-to-market from months to days through abstraction layers

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 8+ years in data architecture/platform engineering (CS/Math/Sciences degree or equivalent)

• Critical: Personally architected and scaled Databricks/Snowflake processing 100M+ rows daily in production

• Implemented feature-slice driven delivery with proven time-to-market improvements

• Battle-tested through incidents, migrations, and 10x+ growth phases

We're NOT looking for:

• Whiteboard-only architects without hands-on implementation

• Anyone without concrete optimization examples or 10x+ scaling experience

Technical Expertise

• Azure cloud architecture expertise(AWS/GCP transferable)

• Infrastructure-as-code proficiency(Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation)

• Production Databricks and Snowflake implementations

• Data virtualization, API versioning, distributed systems

• Single-tenant and multi-tenant architectures at scale

• Medallion architecture with quality gates

• Proven cost optimization with specific examples

• Schema evolution maintaining backward compatibility

• Event-driven architectures with Azure Service Bus

• Modern orchestration and CI/CD practices

Platform Mindset

1. Horizontal scaling and rapid feature addition

2. Self-service capabilities for multiple personas

3. Incremental value delivery over big-bang releases

4. Platform economics and cost optimization at scale

Preferred Qualifications

• Microsoft Fabric experience

• Banking domain expertise: ALM, liquidity management, funds transfer pricing, CECL, deposit analytics

• Regulatory compliance (Basel III, DFAST, CECL, liquidity coverage ratios)

• Financial institution data: core banking systems, loan/deposit portfolios, investment securities

• Pyramid Analytics or similar BI platforms

• Delta Lake/Iceberg, Unity Catalog

• DataOps, MLOps, GitOps practices

• Open-source contributions

Success Metrics (Year 1)

1. Scale: Handle 4x growth with architecture proven for 10x+ additional scale

2. Product Integration: ALM, Liquidity, Profitability, and Planning products fully migrated to unified platform

3. BI Migration: Pyramid Analytics migrated from Direct Query to Platform consumption

4. Speed: New bank/credit union onboarding reduced to days; features ship weekly

5. Adoption:100% new integrations follow platform patterns

6. Self-Service:90%+ risk analysts and finance users discover data without assistance

7. Cost: Infrastructure scales sub-linearly with demonstrated optimization wins
   

What We Offer

• Opportunity to architect a next-generation Data Platform with modern best practices, unbounded by legacy constraints

• Strategic role defining Empyrean's data architecture and directly influencing product roadmap and company direction

• Competitive compensation package commensurate with the strategic impact of this role High autonomy to build and lead your vision with full remote flexibility

• Direct collaboration with C-suite and product leadership