Forward Deployed Architect

Forward Deployed Architect

Remote : EST /CST /PST

7 + months Contract

Summary: A senior strategic advisor and executive-level leader for Looker and governed-AI engagements. This role aligns customer business outcomes with modern data architecture, semantic structures and adoption roadmaps. You will oversee Looker and BigQuery deployments, make sure the customer's data foundation is ready for conversational AI, and act as the trusted counterpart to customer executives.

Responsibilities

• Executive advisory: Advise CDOs, VPs of Analytics and data platform leaders, translating business goals into a Looker and BigQuery architecture and adoption strategy.
• BI-to-AI roadmaps: Lead discovery and planning sessions that produce migration and semantic-layer strategy blueprints and executive roadmaps for large organizations.
• Engagement oversight: Provide architectural governance across migration, CoE and team-acceleration engagements; review designs from Technical Architects and Forward Deployed Engineers.
• Migration unblocking: Use AI-assisted scope and decomposition analysis to reframe legacy BI estates (Tableau, MicroStrategy, Power BI, Looker Studio) as future-state conversational analytics on Looker.
• Executive storytelling: Deliver executive presentations and progress reports that secure sponsorship and expand adoption.
• Platform escalation: Surface product gaps and coordinate technical escalations with the platform vendor's support and engineering channels.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years in data and analytics, including 5+ years architecting enterprise BI and data platforms in consulting, professional services or a customer-facing architecture role.
• Deep expertise in Looker (LookML, semantic modeling, governance, embedded analytics) and cloud data services (BigQuery, Dataform or dbt, data catalog and governance tooling).
• Track record leading large-scale BI migrations and modernization programs at Fortune 500 organizations.
• Experience advising C-level and VP-level stakeholders, with strong facilitation and presentation skills.
• Able to run several concurrent engagements at fractional capacity while keeping strategic continuity.

Preferred

• Conversational analytics, LLM-grounded semantic layers and agentic workflows.
• Enterprise change management, CoE design and adoption measurement frameworks.
• Professional Data Engineer or Looker certifications.
• Prior experience as a cloud partner or professional services architect.