Principal Infrastructure Architect: Data Platform
Company: ZoomInfo Technologies LLC
Location: Remote
Source: We Work Remotely
About ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is where careers accelerate. We move fast, think boldly, and empower you to do the best work of your life. You’ll be surrounded by teammates who care deeply, challenge each other, and celebrate wins. With tools that amplify your impact and a culture that backs your ambition, you won’t just contribute. You’ll make things happen–fast.
The Role
As a Principal Infrastructure Architect on our Infrastructure Architecture team, you will be the architecture team's partner to ZoomInfo's data engineering organization. Data engineering owns the platforms and the products built on them. You bring the infrastructure patterns, evaluation rigor, and cross-team alignment that help them build and run those platforms well on GCP.
This is a cloud architect seat with a data specialty. You bring the same cloud, Kubernetes, networking, and infrastructure-as-code foundation as the rest of the architecture team, plus enough hands-on depth in data systems to be credible with the engineers who run them.
The work breaks down four ways:
- Patterns: You establish and maintain the paved-road patterns data teams build on: infrastructure as code, CI/CD for data jobs and pipelines, monitoring and alerting, performance, and cost. You keep them easy to consume and self-service.
- Enablement and alignment: You help data teams adopt those patterns, review their designs, and work through hard infrastructure trade-offs with them.
- Evaluation: You run POCs of new data technologies and vendor offerings as part of the procurement and technology-lifecycle process, and you write recommendations engineering leaders can act on.
- Shared stewardship: You take a full share of the architecture team's general work: weekly architecture reviews across all domains, standards and ADRs, and infrastructure consulting for any team that needs it.
What You'll Do
- Establish infrastructure patterns for data workloads: Design and maintain reference patterns for provisioning and operating the data platforms ZoomInfo runs (streaming, operational databases, analytical stores, search, pipeline orchestration, and open table formats). Ship them as Terraform modules, GitOps workflows, and documented standards.
- Build the data paved road: Define CI/CD and GitOps patterns for data jobs and pipelines, and partner with platform engineering and data engineering to make data delivery as safe and automated as application delivery.
- Establish performance, cost, and observability patterns: Give data teams the patterns and guidance to run stores and pipelines efficiently and the monitoring, alerting, and SLO practices that make performance and cost visible. Partner with FinOps on data-layer spend.
- Evaluate new technologies: Run structured POCs of emerging data technologies and vendor offerings. Weigh self-hosted against vendor-managed, map migration and exit paths, model cost, and write up a recommendation.
- Bring managed data services inside the perimeter: Define the patterns for connecting vendor-managed data planes (Confluent Cloud, Snowflake, MongoDB Atlas, etc.) to our GCP environment, ensuring security, identity, and encryption compliance.
- Support data consolidation and governance efforts: Contribute infrastructure guidance to data engineering's work on consolidating where data lives and is accessed, and on data classification, residency, and access policy.
- Prototype and hand off: Build the reference implementation, write the ADR, and partner with the owning teams to roll the pattern out.
- Participate in architecture review: Bring a consistent, documented rubric to weekly architecture reviews across all domains. Expand the standards library and ADR catalog.
- Enable teams: Host design reviews and workshops. Serve as the infrastructure consultant to data teams making complex choices.
What We're Looking For
- Influence and communication: You can present a recommendation, show its value, and back it with prototypes, benchmarks, and documented rationale.
- Cloud infrastructure foundation: Production experience architecting on GCP and/or AWS (compute, Kubernetes, VPC networking, IAM, and workload identity). Strong Terraform and GitOps skills.
- Hands-on data infrastructure experience at scale: You've built and operated infrastructure under data platforms at multi-terabyte to petabyte scale.
- Depth in at least two data domains, fluency across the rest: Deep experience in at least two of: streaming (Kafka/Confluent, Flink), relational databases (PostgreSQL), NoSQL (MongoDB), columnar analytics (BigQuery, Snowflake, Iceberg), search (Elasticsearch/Solr), or pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Dataflow/Beam).
- Performance and cost engineering: You've diagnosed and fixed expensive or slow data workloads and turned the fixes into reusable patterns.
- Development and operational depth: You can dive into code to prove out a pattern and test behavior under load.
- Technology evaluation: You've run rigorous evaluations that separate vendor pitch from architectural fit.
Bonus Points
- Supported a lakehouse or data mesh migration from the infrastructure side.
- Implemented data classification, residency, or privacy/compliance (GDPR/CCPA) controls at the infrastructure layer.
- Run graph or distributed SQL databases in production.
- Know the infrastructure demands of AI/ML data workloads (feature stores, vector databases, embedding pipelines).
- Built or applied AI-augmented developer or architecture workflows.
- Run or participated in an Architecture Review Council or equivalent governance body.
Education and Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10–15+ years of cloud infrastructure, platform, or data infrastructure engineering experience, including several years establishing patterns and standards that multiple teams depend on.
Compensation
US Base Salary Range: $157,500 – $247,500 USD
Additional compensation such as Bonus, Commission, Equity and other benefits may also apply. Actual compensation offered will be based on factors such as the candidate’s work location, qualifications, skills, experience and/or training.
Learn more about ZoomInfo benefits here.
About Us
ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: GTM) is the Go-To-Market Intelligence Platform that empowers businesses to grow faster with AI-ready insights, trusted data, and advanced automation.
ZoomInfo is an equal opportunity employer. Please review our Job Applicant Privacy Notice and NYC Local Law 144 Notice for more details.
To apply: Click here to apply via We Work Remotely