Lead Data Architect

The Lead Data Architect owns the enterprise data architecture for a large-scale, greenfield SAP S/4HANA financial management modernization program for a Department of War (DoW) organization, accountable for the target-state data model, master data governance strategy, legacy data migration architecture, and the analytics and data fabric layer that serves reporting and decision support across the enterprise. This position leads the program’s data architecture and master data team, establishing the authoritative data standards that allow financial, logistics, asset, and organizational information to reconcile without manual intervention. The Lead Data Architect is accountable for data quality entering the target system at each deployment wave and for the lineage and provenance evidence required to sustain financial audit.

Note: This position is contingent upon contract award.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Owns the target-state enterprise data architecture, including conceptual, logical, and physical data models for financial, organizational, asset, material, and business partner master data domains.

• Leads and develops the data architecture and master data team, including master data management and master data governance practitioners; allocates work and owns team performance and capability development.

• Establishes the master data governance operating model, including domain ownership, stewardship assignment, approval workflows, data quality rules, and measurable data quality standards.

• Owns the legacy data migration architecture, including source system discovery and profiling, extraction approach, transformation and mapping governance, staging design, and source-to-target lineage.

• Defines the data validation, reconciliation, and acceptance criteria applied at each mock conversion cycle and at production cutover, and reports readiness against those criteria at milestone gates.

• Designs the organizational data structures that align financial objects to the customer’s force structure hierarchy, enabling consistent translation between logistics, asset, and financial reporting views.

• Governs the analytics and data fabric architecture, including ingestion, layered curation, semantic modeling, and the governed consumption of financial data by downstream enterprise analytics platforms.

• Establishes reconciliation architecture between the financial system of record, subledgers, external interfaces, and the reporting layer, minimizing manual reconciliation effort.

• Defines data retention, archiving, classification, and protection standards consistent with federal records management and controlled unclassified information handling requirements.

• Partners with the solution and cloud architecture functions to ensure data designs are performant, secure, authorizable, and sustainable.

• Presents and defends the data architecture and migration readiness at preliminary design review, critical design review, production readiness review, and cutover decision points.

• Advises program leadership on data-driven risk, including migration complexity, data quality exposure, and the schedule implications of source system conditions.

• Mentors data practitioners across the program, raising data modeling, governance, and stewardship maturity.

• Ability to travel up to 50% to client sites, varying based on client program schedules.

• Adheres to all certified processes as part of our commitment to maintaining the highest standards of quality and information security, which includes actively participating in quality assurance activities and ensuring the protection of sensitive information in accordance with our security policies.

• Performs other related tasks as assigned by direct supervisor.

Essential People Leader Functions:

• People Management & Performance Accountability: Sets performance expectations; provides ongoing coaching, feedback, and recognition; conducts goal-setting, evaluations, and development planning; and addresses performance, conduct, and attendance issues in a timely, compliant manner.

• Employee Development & Capability Building: Develops employees through coaching, mentoring, training, and stretch assignments; identifies skill gaps and development needs; and supports succession planning and talent pipeline readiness within scope.

• Engagement, Culture & Team Effectiveness: Fosters an inclusive, respectful, high-performing environment; promotes accountability and collaboration; and reinforces company values, behavioral expectations, and professional standards.

• Workforce Planning & Resource Oversight: Plans, assigns, and prioritizes work to meet delivery, quality, and timeline goals; manages workloads and staffing within approved parameters; and escalates resource risks or constraints as needed.

• Policy, Compliance & Risk Management: Applies company policies and employment practices consistently; partners with HR on employee relations matters; and identifies and mitigates people, delivery, and compliance risks.

• Communication & Stakeholder Alignment: Communicates expectations, decisions, and changes clearly; aligns team or organizational objectives with business priorities; and collaborates effectively across matrixed, cross-functional, or client environments.

C5MI Expectations of all Employees:

• Adheres to all C5MI Policies and Procedures.

• Always conducts self in a manner consistent with C5MIs’ Core Values.

• Maintains a positive and respectful attitude with all contacts.

• Consistently reports to work on time and prepared to perform the duties of the position.

• Meets productivity standards and performs duties as workload necessitates.

• Maintains the privacy of all company proprietary information.

• Treats vendors, customers, and team members with respect and dignity.

• Able to safely perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience; 8-12 years of relevant experience and 3-5 years of people leadership experience with a Bachelor’s degree, or 10-14 years of relevant experience and 5-8 years of people leadership experience without a degree. Advanced certifications valued.

• 8+ years of enterprise data architecture, data modeling, or data management experience on large-scale system implementations.

• Demonstrated experience owning data architecture for at least one full lifecycle ERP implementation, including legacy data migration to a target platform.

• Expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling, canonical data models, data lineage, and data quality management.

• Experience establishing a master data governance operating model, including stewardship roles, data quality rules, and governance workflow.

• Hands-on experience with enterprise data migration tooling and methods, including extraction, profiling, cleansing, transformation, load, and reconciliation.

• Experience designing analytics or data platform architectures, including layered curation and semantic modeling for enterprise reporting.

• Experience leading a data team, including work allocation, quality review, and performance management.

• Secret security clearance required: must hold an active Secret clearance or be able to obtain and maintain one prior to assignment (requires U.S. citizenship).

Nice to Have:

• Active Secret security clearance at time of hire.

• Experience with SAP Master Data Governance and SAP data migration tooling, including the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit and SAP Data Services.

• Industry-recognized data management, data architecture, or SAP certification; relevant certifications include CDMP or SAP Master Data Governance.

• Experience supporting federal ERP modernization programs, Department of War (DoW) SAP environments, or other defense business systems acquired under DoDI 5000.75.

• Familiarity with Department of War data strategy principles and authoritative data source designation.

• Familiarity with federal financial audit drivers, including the Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) methodology, DoD 7000.14-R (Financial Management Regulation), and FFMIA.

• Experience with cloud data platform technologies supporting large-scale analytical workloads.

Compensation: In accordance with pay transparency law, the expected salary range for this position is $172,300 – $187,100 annually. The actual compensation offered will be determined based on factors such as the candidate’s experience, qualifications, skills, and location. We are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. This posted range reflects our good faith estimate of the compensation we reasonably expect to offer for this role at the time of posting.

Application Deadline: We anticipate this job posting will be posted until 12/01/2026