GCP Data Architect

Position: GCP Data Architect

Responsibilities:

Discovery and assessment

Assess the current client data landscape: the PostgreSQL schemas, volumes and growth; the third-party spreadsheets; the REST API integrations; and the HTML sources.

Run workshops with business owners, product, IT, security and report consumers. Capture KPIs, reporting needs, data freshness SLAs and pain points.

Document current data flows, dependencies, data ownership and data quality issues.

Target architecture design

Design the end-to-end data platform on GCP: ingestion, landing zone (GCS), BigQuery warehouse, transformation, semantic layer and Power BI consumption.

Define an ingestion pattern for each source type:

PostgreSQL: CDC or incremental loads (for example, Datastream)

REST APIs: Cloud Run or Cloud Functions with Pub/Sub or Cloud Scheduler

Spreadsheets: GCS or Google Sheets with schema validation

Define the BigQuery layers (Raw → Curated → Marts), naming conventions and how datasets and projects are organized.

Design dimensional data models (star schemas and SCD handling) optimized for Power BI.

Required Skills:

Expert in BigQuery: modelling, partitioning/clustering, performance tuning, cost and slot management

GCP data services: GCS, Dataflow, Datastream, Pub/Sub, Cloud Composer, Cloud Run/Functions

Deep PostgreSQL knowledge: CDC/logical replication, migrating TB-scale datasets

Data warehousing and dimensional modelling (Kimball), SCD, medallion architecture

ELT with Dataform or dbt, plus strong SQL

Integrating REST APIs, spreadsheets and semi-structured and HTML data

Power BI architecture: semantic models, DirectQuery vs Import, gateways, RLS, performance with BigQuery

GCP security and governance: IAM, VPC-SC, KMS, policy tags, Terraform and CI/CD