Data Strategist

Job Title: Data StrategistLocation: Mclean VAEmployment Type: ContractAbout Smart IT Frame:At Smart IT Frame, we connect top talent with leading organizations across the USA. With over a decade of staffing excellence, we specialize in IT, healthcare, and professional roles, empowering both clients and candidates to grow together.Role Summaryseeking an experienced Data Strategist to define and drive enterprise data strategy, modern data architecture, governance, and AI-ready data solutions across cloud platforms. The ideal candidate will combine strong expertise in AWS, Snowflake, PySpark, Snowpark, SQL, data modeling, and data integration with the ability to translate business objectives into scalable, governed, and cost-effective data solutions.The Data Strategist will work closely with business stakeholders, data architects, engineering teams, analytics teams, and AI/ML teams to establish data patterns, modernize data pipelines, improve data accessibility and quality, and enable advanced analytics and RAG/Agentic AI use cases.The Data Strategist will be expected to:Establish a scalable and governed AWS + Snowflake target data architecture.Reduce unnecessary data movement and improve data processing efficiency through the right mix of PySpark, Snowpark, Snowflake Dynamic Tables, and cloud-native orchestration.Define reusable data architecture and engineering standards across delivery teams.Improve data quality, discoverability, lineage, security, and governance.Convert business priorities into a practical data modernization and AI roadmap with measurable business outcomes.Key ResponsibilitiesDefine and drive enterprise data strategy, target-state architecture, modernization roadmaps, and reusable design patterns aligned with business priorities.Architect scalable cloud data solutions using AWS, Snowflake, PySpark, Snowpark, SQL, and IICS.Design modern Snowflake solutions leveraging Iceberg, Dynamic Tables, Views, Tasks, Horizon, Cortex, and Agents.Lead large-scale data processing using PySpark on EKS and containerized Spark, focusing on scalability, performance, and optimization.Define data ingestion, integration, modeling, transformation, and serving patterns for analytics, reporting, and AI workloads.Establish data governance, quality, metadata, lineage, security, access control, and data modeling standards.Design and support RAG and Agentic AI solutions/PoCs, including retrieval, grounding, orchestration, security, and evaluation.Define enterprise orchestration and scheduling patterns using Control-M, AWS Step Functions, and Snowflake Tasks.Optimize legacy and cloud data architectures to reduce data movement, improve performance, and control AWS/Snowflake costs.Conduct architecture reviews, establish engineering best practices, and provide technical leadership to data engineering and architecture teams.Partner with business and technology leaders to translate strategic priorities into data, analytics, and AI transformation roadmaps.Required SkillsStrong expertise in AWS data Servies, Snowflake, PySpark, Snowpark, SQL, and data modeling.Experience with IICS, Control-M, cloud data architecture, and data governance.Strong communication, architecture, problem-solving, and stakeholder-management skills.Regards,MuralirajaMuraliraja@smartitframe.com