Senior Data Architect

Xcel Energy (NASDAQ: XEL) is a leading energy provider and Fortune 500 company, dedicated to serving millions of electricity and natural gas customers across eight states: Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Texas. We make energy work better for our customers, helping them thrive every day. That means always raising the bar - delivering better service and providing more reliable, resilient, and sustainable energy. 

Xcel Energy is a place where you’ll have opportunities to grow, expand your skills, and help lead the clean energy transition. We offer meaningful rewards, recognition, and support to help you build your career and make an impact - both on the job and beyond. Most importantly, it means you’ll be joining a company that knows employees are the driving force behind its success and is committed to helping you be your best.

 

Xcel Energy supports a hybrid work model to enable collaboration and flexibility. Many roles are expected to work onsite three days per week (Tuesday–Thursday); however, work location expectations vary based on role, team, and business needs.

 

Position Summary

The Senior Data Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for advancing enterprise data architecture and driving a data product operating model that connects project delivery to a clear architectural north star. As a member of a cross-functional data product team, this role helps design, manage, deploy, maintain, and continuously improve data products as software products using agile product-team practices. The architect defines and governs reference architectures, reusable design patterns, and standards that progressively modernize the data estate and enable trusted, discoverable, and reusable data consumption through Xcel Data Fabric (XDF). 
 
The architect participates directly in project-level architecture design, translating business needs into end-to-end solutions and evaluating trade-offs across data modeling, integration, security, governance, scalability, and operational sustainability. Working with business partners, subject matter experts, data owners and stewards, developers, product owners, data engineers, enterprise architecture, and platform teams, this role guides domain-owned data products throughout their lifecycle, including definition, onboarding to XDF, deployment, ongoing maintenance, and evolution. This includes clear ownership, data contracts, semantics, metadata, access controls, and service expectations. 
 
This position requires the depth to resolve complex design challenges and the enterprise perspective to shape technology direction, define practical transition roadmaps, and influence adoption without direct authority. The architect connects near-term investment decisions to the target architecture, promotes reuse over isolated solutions, and communicates the health, risks, and modernization needs of the data domain.

Essential Responsibilities

• Architectural Operations: Review and approve projects and work efforts to ensure that they are compliant with architectural standards. Track and manage exceptions to standards. Continuously improve operational processes. Assess, report, and make recommendations to eliminate operational risk related to technology or architecture.
• Technical Expertise: Provide consultation and direction to delivery and operational teams on optimal architecture for respective solutions. Maintain state-of-the-art expertise of enterprise architecture technologies, frameworks, and industry innovations.
• Leadership: Lead work cross-organizationally through coaching and feedback, and through significant interactions and influence with leaders. Govern work efforts to ensure alignment with reference architecture, IT strategy and policy. Collaborate cross-organizationally to influence alignment on and adoption of enterprise architecture standards.
• Planning and Strategy: Participate in creation and renewal of an overarching IT strategy. Develop and enforce reference architecture standards that are aligned with IT strategies and principles. Contribute to architecture road maps and provide input to technology roadmaps. Ensure the domain IT Strategy align with Enterprise Architecture framework and standards.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in technology, science, business or related field, or 4 years of experience equivalent to the position.
• 10 years of related functional experience.
• Architecture acumen across multiple domains including network, infrastructure, software, hosting models, mobile platforms, and security.
• Exposure to diverse systems, technologies and processing environments in a large corporate setting.
• Project solution architecture experience.
• General knowledge of core aspects of enterprise architecture (Software, Hardware, Network, Integration, Data, hosting models, platform types, etc.).
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Extensive knowledge of future technology trends within area of expertise.
• Demonstrated leadership on technical aspects of large scale projects.
• Excellent communication skills, effective with varying organizational levels and skill sets.
• Excellent Relationship Management and collaboration skills, with a track record of working as one team cross-organizationally to drive innovation and business results.

Preferred Requirements

• Demonstrated senior-level experience shaping enterprise data architecture and data product strategy, with a track record of translating a target-state vision into reference architectures, transition roadmaps, and adopted project solutions.

• Deep expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling; domain boundaries; enterprise business semantics; and designing reusable data assets that remain stable as source systems evolve. 

• Experience defining domain-owned, contract-driven data products, including schema, business definitions, ownership and stewardship, quality expectations, freshness, availability, access context, versioning, and lifecycle management.

• Experience establishing repeatable data product onboarding and publication patterns for an enterprise data platform such as XDF, including discovery, metadata, lineage, security, consumer readiness, and operational support expectations. Demonstrated experience applying software-product engineering practices to data products, including version control, automated data and contract testing, continuous integration and delivery, release and rollback strategies, production monitoring, and ongoing maintenance.

• Strong hands-on architecture experience across ingestion, transformation, storage, integration, and consumption, with the ability to evaluate batch, event-driven, and near-real-time approaches and explain trade-offs in performance, resilience, cost, and complexity.

• Demonstrated ability to lead project-level architecture design, document consequential design decisions, assess alternatives, and guide engineering teams from solution definition through implementation while maintaining alignment with enterprise standards.

• Experience defining reusable reference solutions for governed data sharing, analytics, and AI-ready consumption, reducing duplicated pipelines and consumer-specific logic through standardized interfaces and shared semantics.

• Experience embedding data governance, classification, access controls, quality measurement, lineage, and observability into architecture designs in partnership with business owners, data stewards, security, and platform teams.

• Proven ability to influence business and technology leaders without direct authority, facilitate cross-domain design decisions, mentor architects and engineers, and communicate architectural trade-offs and modernization priorities to executive and technical audiences.

 

Our culture is grounded in shared values and employee commitments that guide how we work, support one another, and grow together.

Our Values

Connected, Committed, Trustworthy, Safe

Our Employee Commitments

• Work that makes a difference
• A team you can count of
• Opportunities to grow
• Rewards that help you thrive

 

Xcel Energy provides job applicants reasonable accommodations for disabilities throughout the application process. If you are in need of an accommodation to complete the application process, now or at any time in the future, please complete the Applicant Accommodation Request Form. 

Non-Bargaining

 

The anticipated starting base pay for this position is: $112,000.00 to $165,000.00 per year

 

This position is eligible for the following benefits: Annual Incentive Program, Medical/Pharmacy Plan, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, Health Care Flexible Spending Account, Health Savings Account (HSA) (if enrolled in eligible health plan), Limited-Purpose FSA (if enrolled in eligible health plan and HSA), Transportation Reimbursement Account, Short-term disability (STD), Long-term disability (LTD), Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Fitness Center Reimbursement (if enrolled in eligible health plan), Tuition reimbursement, Transit programs, Employee recognition program, Pension, 401(k) plan, Paid time off (PTO), Holidays, Volunteer Paid Time Off (VPTO), Parental Leave

 

Benefit plans are subject to change and Xcel Energy has the right to end, suspend, or amend any of its plans, at any time, in whole or in part.

In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information including but not limited to dates of school attendance and graduation.  You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.

 

Deadline to Apply: 11/25/26

 

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Accessibility Statement

Xcel Energy endeavors to make https://www.xcelenergy.com and https://jobs.xcelenergy.com accessible to any and all users. If you are in need of an accommodation to complete the application process, now or at any time in the future, please complete the Applicant Accommodation Request Form. For any other application related questions, including application follow-ups or technical issues, please use our Recruiting Assistance, Electra, for assistance. Electra can be found in the lower right-hand corner of our Xcel Energy Careers site.