Sr Data Architect II :Marketing-Work Model: Framingham, Massachusetts
Staples is business to business. You’re what binds us together.
Team Summary:
Staples Digital Solutions is advancing customer and marketing experiences through trusted data, real-time intelligence, and responsible AI. The team partners across Data Engineering, Data Science and AI, MarTech, Digital, Product, Sales, Marketing Operations, Analytics, Privacy, and external platform providers to build scalable capabilities that support personalization, intelligent decisioning, activation, and measurable growth.
Role Summary:
Staples is seeking a senior-level Data Architect to lead the architecture of customer, marketing, real-time data, and AI capabilities that power personalized experiences, intelligent decisioning, and measurable growth across digital, marketing, paid media, sales, and service channels. The Sr Data Architect II will define secure, governed, reusable architecture patterns across Customer 360, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), identity, event streaming, analytics, machine learning, and activation platforms. This role owns architecture from source through activation, including unified customer and account profiles, identity resolution, batch and real-time integration, AI-enabled insights, cross-channel activation, and closed-loop measurement.
What you’ll be doing:
- Own current-state, transition-state, and target-state data and AI architecture for Customer 360, CDP, marketing data, personalization, paid media, intelligent decisioning, and real-time activation.
- Design unified customer and account data models that connect identity, profile, transaction, contract, digital behavior, campaign engagement, sales, product, and third-party signals.
- Define identity-resolution patterns across known and anonymous users, accounts, devices, sessions, cookies, and channel identifiers, including confidence tiers and appropriate activation and measurement uses.
- Lead the evolution from batch-oriented pipelines to event-driven, streaming, and near-real-time architectures supporting onboarding, abandonment, personalization, and cross-channel triggers.
- Architect integrations among Customer 360, CDP, Snowflake and/or Databricks, Adobe Target and Adobe Web SDK, Salesforce, Marketo, journey-orchestration platforms, paid-media destinations, analytics, and measurement solutions.
- Design composable CDP data models, schemas, audience attributes, event taxonomies, caching strategies, semantic naming standards, workspace separation, role-based access controls, and promotion patterns across development, QA, and production.
- Enable propensity, affinity, recommendation, lead-scoring, churn, next-best-action, and generative AI outputs to flow into CDP and downstream channels as governed, observable activation attributes and services.
- Create scalable paid-media data and activation architecture spanning API ingestion, campaign taxonomy, curated fact and dimension models, audience synchronization, conversion feedback, attribution, and finance-grade reconciliation.
- Design closed-loop measurement patterns connecting audiences and campaign activations with site, email, paid media, sales, conversion, revenue, and lifetime-value outcomes.
- Establish reusable data contracts, APIs, event schemas, lineage, observability, data-quality controls, service-level agreements, and monitoring for critical customer and marketing data products.
- Partner with Product and business leaders to translate personalization, acquisition, marketing, and sales objectives into architecture decisions, implementation roadmaps, and clear trade-offs.
- Lead architecture reviews, whiteboarding sessions, proofs of concept, and vendor evaluations; document decisions, dependencies, risks, and recommended paths forward.
- Provide technical direction to engineering teams and partners, review detailed designs, resolve cross-platform issues, and align solutions with enterprise architecture, privacy, security, and compliance standards.
- Mentor architects and engineers, promote common design patterns, and strengthen architecture maturity across customer and marketing data domains.
What you bring to the table:
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving abilities.
- Strong leadership, mentoring, communication, collaboration, and negotiation skills.
- Strategic thinking and business acumen, with the ability to communicate complex recommendations and trade-offs to senior leaders.
- Ability to operate with sound independent judgment in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment.
- A forward-looking approach to emerging data, AI, and customer-experience technologies, including responsible AI and appropriate governance.
What’s needed- Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years of experience designing enterprise data platforms, integration architectures, and high-volume data products.
- 2+ years of experience implementing and configuring Customer Data Platforms.
- Proven experience architecting Customer 360, CDP, identity-resolution, personalization, marketing-data, or customer-activation solutions in B2B and/or B2C environments.
- Hands-on expertise with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or equivalent, and modern ELT/ETL and orchestration tools such as dbt, Airflow, Fivetran, or native cloud services.
- Experience designing batch, micro-batch, streaming, API, and event-driven integrations, including event schemas, idempotency, latency, replay, observability, and failure handling.
- Deep knowledge of dimensional, relational, event, document, graph, and semantic data-modeling patterns.
- Experience with CDP and MarTech platforms such as Hightouch, Adobe Experience Platform/Real-Time CDP, ActionIQ, Treasure Data, Twilio Segment, Salesforce Data Cloud, Adobe Target, Marketo, Salesforce, Optimove, or comparable technologies.
- Experience with identity resolution, consent, privacy, PII classification, data governance, lineage, data quality, access control, and secure activation patterns.
- Experience architecting and operationalizing machine-learning and generative AI capabilities with governance, monitoring, and human oversight.
- Knowledge of paid-media activation and measurement across platforms such as Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta, LinkedIn, The Trade Desk, and LiveRamp.
- Fluency in SQL and working knowledge of Python, Java, Scala, or another language used for data and integration engineering.
- Experience with REST APIs, webhooks, event buses, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and cloud security patterns.
- Demonstrated ability to lead architecture across multiple teams, create decision documents and roadmaps, and communicate recommendations to senior leaders.
What’s needed- Preferred Qualifications:
- Master’s or doctoral degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- Experience in retail, B2B commerce, marketing technology, digital experience, or customer lifecycle domains.
- Architecture experience with Adobe Web SDK/Edge, Adobe Target, Snowflake, Databricks, Salesforce, and composable CDP patterns.
- Experience designing real-time customer-context layers, identity graphs, decisioning services, feature stores, or streaming architectures using Kafka, Kinesis, Event Hubs, Pub/Sub, Snowplow, RudderStack, or equivalent.
- Experience with multi-touch attribution, incrementality testing, media-mix measurement, audience feedback loops, and closed-loop campaign measurement.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted decisioning, recommendation systems, agentic workflows, responsible AI, and governance of model-driven customer experiences.
- Relevant cloud, data, architecture, or security certifications.
We Offer:
- Inclusive culture with associate-led Business Resource Groups
- 22 days of PTO and Holiday Schedule (7 observed paid holidays + 1 floating holiday)
- Online and Retail Discounts, Company Match 401(k), Physical and Mental Health Wellness programs, and more!
The salary range represents the expected compensation for this role at the time of posting. The specific base pay may be influenced by a variety of factors to include the candidate's experience, skill set, education, geography, business considerations, and internal equity. In addition to base pay, this role may be eligible for bonuses, or other forms of variable compensation.
Staples is an Equal Opportunity Employer who values the diversity of our people, products, and services. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other basis protected by federal, state, or local law.
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