Data Architect - Snowflake

Position Summary:

Knorr-Bremse, the world leader in braking systems and safety-critical mobility solutions, is building an AI Center of Excellence to accelerate innovation across its truck and rail businesses. To realize this ambition, KB must establish an enterprise AI-ready data foundation layer that is trusted, governed, and reusable across every business domain. We are seeking an AI Ready Data Lead to design and develop scalable digital data foundation for AI and the end-to-end technical authority for that platform.

This is a senior management role within KB's global AI leadership, demanding strong technical leadership combined with enterprise-scale influence. The successful candidate will define technical standards, cross-squad patterns, and the policies and metrics that govern data accuracy and reliability, while designing the self-service infrastructure that lets delivery squads build and deploy data assets independently. The technical platform will focus on Snowflake. This is a highly impactful portfolio with direct ownership of the data backbone underpinning KB's AI transformation.

Essential Functions:

Technical Leadership & Standards

• Provide strong technical leadership across the global AI organization, acting as the design authority for the AI-ready data foundation.
• Define technical standards, cross-squad patterns, and reference designs that ensure architectural integrity and consistency across all data squads.
• Set organization-wide policies and metrics for data accuracy, reliability, freshness, and trust, and hold the platform accountable to them.

Self-Service Platform & Automation

• Design the infrastructure and platform capabilities that allow squads to build, certify, and deploy data assets and data products independently.
• Automate the underlying tooling — databases, orchestration, and ML-Ops — consumed by the squads, reducing manual effort and accelerating delivery.
• Establish the data foundation layer (Bronze/Silver/Gold tiers) on a Snowflake-centric platform, ensuring scalability, performance, and cost efficiency.

Architectural Oversight & Design Authority

• Act as the ultimate technical authority for AI products data architecture, ensuring best practices in multi-cluster (virtual warehouse) environments, secure data sharing, and workload isolation.
• Review and approve key architectural decisions, balancing performance, cost, security, and long-term maintainability.

Data Governance & Security

• Lead the implementation of data governance frameworks (e.g., Collibra, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms) across the enterprise.
• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and row-level and column-level masking to enforce least-privilege access and protect sensitive data.
• Ensure the data foundation aligns with GDPR, the EU AI Act, and KB's internal information and data security guidelines.

Vendor & Partner Scaling

• Set up and manage vendor and partner ecosystems to scale the data foundation across the organization and to optimize the run (operate) organization.
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions and manage delivery partners against clear quality, cost, and SLA expectations.

Mentorship

• Provide technical leadership, code reviews, and mentorship to junior and mid-level data engineers, raising the engineering bar across squads.
• Promote a culture of architectural discipline, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

Skills:

• Data Lake / Cloud Data Platform: Snowflake (multi-cluster, data sharing, workload isolation)
• Data Modeling & Medallion Architecture (Bronze / Silver / Gold)
• Data Governance & Cataloguing: Collibra, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms
• Security: RBAC, row-level & column-level masking, data classification
• ELT/ETL, Orchestration, ML-Ops and platform automation
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP

General Skills

• Technical Leadership & Architecture Authority Expert
• Data Governance & Security Expert
• Vendor / 3rd party resource management Expert
• Communication / presentation skills Expert
• Automotive / Railways industry analytics Functional

Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills are essential, including the ability to influence peers and senior business stakeholders across Knorr-Bremse AG.

Experience:

• 12+ years in data engineering / data platform architecture, with significant experience leading enterprise-scale data foundation initiatives.
• Proven, hands-on expertise architecting and operating Snowflake at enterprise scale.
• Track record of defining technical standards and self-service platforms that enable independent delivery squads.
• Demonstrated ability to set up and scale vendor/partner ecosystems and optimize run organizations.
• Strong team leadership and mentoring experience; entrepreneurial, execution-focused mindset.

Education:

• B.Tech / Master's in IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields.
• Certification on a data lake / cloud data platform such as Snowflake is an advantage; cloud professional certification preferred.

Position Requirements:

• Ability to travel up to 25% domestically and internationally.

What We Offer

• A unique opportunity to build and own the AI-ready data foundation for a global mobility and safety-critical leader.
• Exposure to global-scale AI and data programs spanning truck, rail, and industrial domains.
• Career growth as part of Knorr-Bremse's global leadership in digital and AI-driven transformation.