Atlan Access & Platform Architect

Purpose

This role owns the design of the access roles, personas, and policy framework for the Client Data Marketplace (Atlan). The framework must scale to about 500 internal employees and 2,000 external customers. The architect will first diagnose and fix the access issues found in UAT, then build a model that internal teams can run on their own.

Key responsibilities

1. Diagnose current issues. Review the existing personas, purposes, policies, and group setup. Find the root cause of the UAT visibility issues and fix them without disrupting current users.
2. Design the target access framework. Build a role- and attribute-based access model that puts Client’s four access tiers into practice: Volunteers, Volunteer Leadership, Staff Leadership, and Power Users.
3. Design for external users. Define how 2,000 external customers are separated from internal users. Cover discovery, metadata vs. data visibility, user roles, and licensing.
4. Integrate with identity. Map access to SSO groups and automate provisioning and deprovisioning through SCIM, so access follows group membership instead of manual assignment.
5. Collaborate with data architects and data engineers. Co-design the framework so it fits the underlying data architecture, classification, tagging, and pipelines. Explain and share the framework in technical terms they can build against.
6. Align with governance processes. Make the platform configuration support the Two-Layer Access Approval / Expanded Use Review process and the Data Sharing & Access Authorization Agreement (DSAA).
7. Validate through testing. Define UAT test cases that check expected vs. actual visibility for each persona before each onboarding wave.
8. Document and hand off. Produce everything the internal team needs to run the model after the engagement ends.

Deliverables

• Current-state assessment with root causes of UAT issues
• Target access model: persona catalog, access matrix by tier, and policy inventory
• Naming conventions for personas, purposes, policies, and identity groups
• SSO/SCIM group mapping design
• External-user access design
• UAT test plan for persona visibility
• Onboarding runbook for new departments and external customers
• Handoff and knowledge-transfer sessions for the internal team

Required experience

• 5+ years in data platform, data governance, or identity and access management (IAM) architecture
• At least 1–2 enterprise Atlan deployments, or deep equivalent experience with Collibra, Alation, or Microsoft Purview
• Has designed role-based and attribute-based access models (RBAC/ABAC) for 1,000+ users, including external or partner users
• Hands-on with Atlan personas, purposes, metadata and data policies, domains and data products, and tag-driven policy propagation
• SSO and SCIM integration with an enterprise identity provider (for example Okta or Microsoft Entra ID), including group design and joiner/mover/leaver automation
• Has taken over an existing configuration that wasn't working and fixed it through structured root-cause analysis

Skills

• Translates governance tiers and approval workflows into a documented, testable access matrix
• Least-privilege design, access reviews, and audit logging
• Familiar with privacy and contractual controls for external data sharing
• Works well with technical peers, especially data architects and data engineers
• Documents clearly and builds for handoff