We are looking for a Senior Architect for a 6-month contract position, with possible extensions in Calgary, Alberta. Must be legally entitled to work in Canada.

This position is a hybrid position primarily on-site in downtown Calgary with 5 days per month remote.

Role Description The role owns the technology architecture standard for data governance and advises developers, data architects, and data modelers on how to build classification, access control, retention, and quality into design and delivery.

Responsibilities

- Author the technology architecture standard for data governance, covering classification, metadata and tagging, access control, retention, quality instrumentation, lineage, and reference data change control across structured, unstructured, and geospatial data
- Advise developers, data architects, and data modellers on how to build governance into design and delivery, at the level of specific schema, model, and control decisions rather than principles. Participate in design reviews and provide written governance assessments of in-flight work
- Define the classification approach for each data shape: structured data in custom application databases and the lakehouse, unstructured content in document and file estates, and geospatial data at the feature and attribute level
- Define the target governance toolchain architecture across Microsoft Purview and Databricks Unity Catalog, including which is authoritative for classification, lineage, and glossary, how the two federate, and what neither covers natively
- Assess the current estate and determine what is governed centrally, what is governed at source, and what is deferred. Sequence governance against what the estate supports today versus what requires platform change
- Advise the team that owns the business data governance standards on technology feasibility, implementation effort, and downstream cost. Identify gaps where those standards are silent, ambiguous, or unimplementable against the current estate, and bring specific recommendations rather than only raising the gap




- Prove each architecture standard with a reference implementation or proof of concept so teams receive a working pattern rather than a document to interpret
- Work with Data Architecture to embed governance into data contracts, schema ownership, and ingestion patterns so new data lands governed by default
- Build the company staff capability through design coaching, pattern walkthroughs, and developer-facing documentation. Transfer each published standard to a named Company owner of record
- Define the data quality technology architecture: how rules are authored, where they execute, how failures are handled, and how quality is measured and reported. Cover the full path from data submitted or captured at source, through ingestion, to consumption
- Establish where quality is enforced versus observed, including validation at point of submission or capture, contract enforcement at ingestion boundaries, and monitoring in the lakehouse. Advise on the cost tradeoff between rejecting bad data early and remediating it downstream

Required Skills and Experience

- University degree in a related discipline (data management, computer science, information management, geomatics, analytics) or equivalent demonstrated experience.
- Professional certification such as CDMP, CIMP, or DGSP is recommended. Demonstrated implementation experience is weighted above certification.
- Demonstrated experience translating data governance requirements into technology architecture that development teams actually built from. Experience limited to framework or policy authorship will not meet this requirement
- Demonstrated experience governing a heterogeneous estate in transition, including deciding what to govern centrally versus at source and sequencing realistically against legacy constraints
- Unstructured data governance: sensitivity and retention labelling, scanning and auto-classification, and DLP across document and file estates




- A proven approach to classification in custom-built applications, covering classification metadata in the application schema, capture at source, and propagation through change data capture into the Lakehouse
- Ability to sit in a design review with developers and modellers and give specific, implementable direction on the design in front of them
- Strong technical writing. Standards must be usable by a developer without the author present
- Demonstrated design of a data quality framework that reached production, including rule authoring, execution, quarantine handling, and measurement. A scorecard without enforcement will not meet this requirement
- Experience with data quality rule execution tooling and the tradeoffs between options, such as Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring, DLT or pipeline expectations, Microsoft Purview data quality, and open source framework

Desired Skills and Experience

- Geospatial data governance: classification and access control at the feature and attribute level, treatment of spatial file formats as governance objects, spatial metadata standards, and generalization or masking of sensitive locations as a privacy control
- Hands-on Microsoft Purview: data map, scanning and classification rules, sensitivity labels, glossary, lineage, and integration with non-Microsoft sources
- Hands-on Databricks Unity Catalog: catalogs, schemas, ownership, tags, grants, row and column level security, agile masking, audit logs, system tables
- Experience with confidential or restricted data management
- Change data capture pipelines, ideally Databricks Lakeflow Connect or equivalent
- Azure, GitHub, and CI/CD for schema and policy as code
- ROT analysis and duplicate detection across structured and unstructured content

Please note that while all applications are appreciated, only candidates selected for interview will be contacted. InSync Systems Inc. is a privately-owned boutique Canadian Resourcing and Consulting Services Company that works closely with a range of corporate clients across multiple industries to bring them solutions that effectively address their business needs.

📌 Senior Architect (Calgary)
🏢 InSync Systems
📍 Calgary