Snowflake Architect and Admin

Roles & Responsibilities and Skillset:

Snowflake Administrator (Snowflake Admin): Responsible for the day-to-day administration, security, performance, monitoring, and operational support of the Snowflake environment.

1. User & Access Management

• Create and manage users, roles, and role hierarchies.
• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
• Grant and revoke privileges on databases, schemas, tables, views, stages, and warehouses.
• Manage service accounts and application integrations.
• Ensure compliance with least-privilege access principles.

2. Security Administration

• Configure Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
• Manage network policies and IP listing.
• Implement data masking and row-level security policies.
• Manage encryption and key management requirements.
• Perform periodic access reviews and audits.

3. Warehouse Administration

• Create and manage virtual warehouses.
• Monitor warehouse utilization and concurrency.
• Configure auto-suspend and auto-resume settings.
• Optimize warehouse sizing and scaling.
• Monitor credits consumption and cost optimization.

4. Monitoring & Performance Management

• Monitor query performance and execution plans.
• Identify long-running and resource-intensive queries.
• Troubleshoot warehouse contention issues.
• Review query history and resource monitors.
• Implement performance tuning recommendations.

5. Data Management

• Manage databases, schemas, tables, views, streams, and tasks.
• Support data loading and unloading processes.
• Manage Time Travel and Fail-safe configurations.
• Oversee cloning and data sharing activities.
• Validate data replication and synchronization processes.

6. Backup, Recovery & Business Continuity

• Configure and monitor replication.
• Support disaster recovery testing.
• Recover data using Time Travel.
• Implement failover procedures.
• Maintain recovery documentation.

7. Cost Management

• Monitor Snowflake credit consumption.
• Configure resource monitors and alerts.
• Analyze usage trends.
• Recommend cost-saving measures.
• Generate usage and chargeback reports.

8. Incident & Support Management

• Troubleshoot production issues.
• Support ETL/ELT platforms such as HVR, Informatica, SnapLogic, and Fivetran.
• Coordinate with application teams during incidents.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA).
• Maintain operational runbooks and SOPs.

9. Change & Release Management

• Deploy Snowflake objects across environments.
• Support CI/CD implementations.
• Execute release activities.
• Validate post-deployment functionality.
• Maintain version control standards.

Snowflake Architect: Responsible for designing the overall Snowflake platform strategy, architecture, standards, governance, and future roadmap.

1. Platform Architecture & Design

• Design enterprise Snowflake architecture.
• Define multi-environment strategy (DEV, QA, UAT, PROD).
• Design secure and scalable data platforms.
• Establish best practices and standards.
• Define data domain boundaries.

2. Data Architecture

• Design data lakehouse and warehouse solutions.
• Create logical and physical data models.
• Develop ingestion, transformation, and consumption layers.
• Design dimensional and analytical data structures.
• Establish metadata management frameworks.

3. Snowflake Solution Design

• Design database, schema, and object structures.
• Define clustering and partitioning strategies.
• Design Streams and Tasks architecture.
• Design replication and failover architecture.
• Build secure data sharing frameworks.

4. Security & Governance

• Define enterprise RBAC model.
• Design data governance framework.
• Architect masking and row access policies.
• Define data retention standards.
• Ensure regulatory compliance.

5. Performance & Scalability Planning

• Design workload isolation strategies.
• Plan warehouse sizing and scaling models.
• Define optimization standards.
• Evaluate future growth requirements.
• Establish performance benchmarks.