Data Architect (Romania)

Lateral stands for technology excellence.

We’re a profitable, award-winning design and technology company with over 20 years of experience launching bold ventures and transforming businesses. A globally distributed team of 200+ experts united by a shared purpose: the continuous pursuit of quality.

Our clients come to us for results, quality and craft - and stay because we keep raising the bar.We do things differently

We do things differently at Lateral

Our mission is simple: design and build great products.
What sets us apart isn’t just the talent of our team - it’s the way we work:

We Have A Bias For Action & Results

We are doers - we spot the gaps, connect the dots, anticipate what’s around the corner and take action. We move fast, stay focused, and let the results - not the effort - speak for themselves.

We Work On Time, On Budget, On Quality

Discipline is our edge - a commitment we make to each other, to our clients, and to the standards we hold ourselves to.

We Care Deeply

We care about our work and about each other. Care Is A Competitive Advantage.

Every detail matters. Every design, every line of code, every decision. Thoughtful by default.

We Do Things Right - Because It’s the Right Thing to Do

Right over easy. Integrity isn’t up for negotiation. We hold the bar high even when no one’s watching. We take pride in doing great work the right way - not the easy way.

We Keep Improving

The best teams keep improving and we’re never done learning.

We iterate. We reflect on what’s working and what’s not. Feedback fuels us, we receive it openly, and adapt quickly. Progress over perfection.

We’re Obsessed With Agility, Not The Agile Manifesto

We don’t chase dogma or rituals - we chase momentum. We adapt processes to fit problems, not the other way around.

We Take Ownership
Everyone leads something here. You will have room to run with ideas, and the trust to execute. That trust is built on how you show up: thinking things through, sweating the details, and following through.What you’ll do

What you’ll do

You’ll join a small, senior Data & Analytics team at a real estate investment firm that has built a sophisticated data platform on Snowflake, pulling together 40+ data sources. The platform has grown fast, and the team now needs an architect who can set the direction: how the data should be layered, modeled, governed, and served so that reporting is reliable and the business can trust it. The immediate priority is financial reporting: mapping account-level activity through account hierarchies into financial statements.

You will:

• Assess and shape the platform architecture. Review the existing Snowflake environment, work out what is actually working and what isn’t, and define the target architecture: layering from raw through staging to marts, naming and grain standards, and how corrections and late-arriving data are handled.

• Design the financial data model. Model general ledger activity, charts of accounts, and account hierarchies so they roll up cleanly into financial statements and management reporting, and stay consistent as new sources are added.

• Design for the business, not just the ticket. Work with finance, investment, and operations stakeholders to understand how Transactions, Reporting and source of truth, and Day-to-day decision making depend on the data, and translate that into scalable designs.

• Own integration design across 40+ sources. Define patterns for ingestion, transformation, and orchestration across real estate systems, finance systems, and external feeds, with attention to lineage, data quality, and testing.

• Optimize for performance and cost. Guide warehouse sizing, query performance, and cost management in Snowflake, and make trade-offs visible to engineers and non-engineers alike.

• Set the standard and lead by example. Run design reviews, produce clear design documentation, mentor data engineers, and push back when something isn’t right.

• Prepare the platform for what’s next. Shape how the team approaches governance, data cataloging, and AI-enabled use cases so outputs are consistent and reusable.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone highly technical who cares deeply about craft and can explain design choices to people who aren’t engineers. You must bring:

• 7+ years in data engineering, data architecture, or database engineering, with real ownership of production data platforms

• Deep, hands-on experience with a cloud data warehouse (Snowflake preferred; Databricks or similar considered), including performance tuning and cost management

• Strong data modeling skills: stating and enforcing grain, dimensional modeling, layered architectures, and handling corrections and late-arriving data

• Advanced SQL and experience designing efficient schemas for high-volume environments

• Experience designing ETL/ELT pipelines and integrations across many sources, with a transformation framework (dbt or similar) and an orchestrator (Airflow, Dagster, or similar)

• Finance literacy: experience modeling general ledger data, charts of accounts, and account hierarchies into financial or management reporting

• Proven ability to diagnose and improve platforms you didn’t build, and to decide what to fix first

• A quality mindset: testing, data quality, lineage, and clear design documentation (diagrams, decisions, trade-offs)

• Strong English communication and comfort with remote, asynchronous work across time zones

• A practical working relationship with AI tools in how you design, build, and document

Bonus points for

• Experience in asset management, investment firms, or commercial real estate

• Familiarity with systems such as Yardi, MRI, RealPage, Argus, VTS, or CoStar

• Experience building analytics-ready models for BI tools (Power BI in particular)

• Exposure to Snowflake AI capabilities (Cortex, agent-building) or data catalog and governance initiatives

• Leadership of data architecture across multiple projects or business domains

• A track record of mentoring other engineers

How to apply and what to expect in the interview process

01. Your work
Show us the work that reflects you at your best. We’ll look at depth, design thinking, and the logic behind your choices.

02. Lateral team fit
You’ll speak with our Talent team about your career direction, your motivators, and our plans ahead.

03. Work trial

You’ll tackle a take-home challenge that mirrors what we actually do.

04. Engineering deep dive
A collaborative session with our engineers.

05. Project fit
An interview focussed on prioritization, collaboration across disciplines, and how you handle the "messy middle".