Lead Data Architect (hybrid)

About Johnson Controls

At Johnson Controls, we transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play. From optimizing building performance to improving safety and enhancing comfort, we drive the outcomes that matter most. Dedicated to protecting the environment, we deliver our promise in industries such as healthcare, education, data centers and manufacturing. With a global team of 100,000 experts in more than 150 countries and over 130 years of innovation, we are the power behind our customers’ mission.

About Security Access Control Business

When Fortune 500 corporations, government customers, or any other enterprise applications concerned with critical security issues need a reliable solution in their day to day operations, more often than not, they turn to Johnson Controls and its security and event management technologies currently installed in thousands of facilities worldwide. Johnson Controls has built a solid reputation in the security industry as an innovator of security and event management technologies. With its continuous investment in R&D, and the ability to leverage new technologies, Johnson Controls has reached technological excellence.

What you will do

Johnson Controls is seeking a a Lead Data Architect to lead the design and evolution of the data infrastructure for our flagship One Security Platform (OSP). This platform serves as the foundation for our next-generation access control, video management, and AI-powered security solutions. You will have the opportunity to define the architecture, technologies, and governance models for data ingestion, storage, analytics, telemetry, and AI model enablement. You will partner with engineering, product, AI/ML, and cloud operations teams to build a robust, scalable, and secure data platform that powers real-time insights, analytics, and intelligent automation. This is a hybrid position. Candidates must be commuting distance to Westford, MA, or able to relocate. Various relocation packages are available.

How you will do it

• Design and evolve the end-to-end data platform architecture that supports telemetry, event streams, metadata, logs, system health, analytics, and ML pipelines.

• Define data modeling standards, retention policies, partitioning, and lifecycle strategies for structured and unstructured data across the OSP ecosystem.

• Partner with AI/ML architects and analytics teams to ensure that the data platform supports training, inferencing, real-time analytics, and alerting use cases.

• Lead the selection and integration of data technologies (e.g., Kafka, Redshift, TimeScaleDB, S3, etc.) aligned to performance, cost, and reliability goals.

• Ensure compliance with regulatory, privacy, and security standards (e.g., GDPR, SOC2, NDAA, FIPS) for data at rest, in motion, and in use.

• Build and maintain telemetry pipelines that feed dashboards, observability tools, and proactive health monitoring for platform services.

• Collaborate closely with platform, cloud, product, and QA teams to ensure data availability, correctness, lineage, and operational efficiency.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to developers, data engineers, and analytics stakeholders.

• Maintain a roadmap for continuous improvement of the data platform with evolving business needs and technology trends.

What you will need
Required

• 10+ years of experience in software/data engineering, with at least 3 years in a data architect or platform architect role.

• Minimum Bachelor's degree in a technical, or engineering, related field.

• Experience designing cloud-native, multi-tenant data platforms for SaaS applications (preferably on Azure, AWS or GCP).

• Deep expertise in event-driven data pipelines, streaming frameworks (Kafka), and big data storage systems.

• Strong hands-on experience with data lake/data warehouse technologies, columnar databases, and time-series storage.

• Understanding of DevOps practices, CI/CD integration for data services, and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).

• Strong understanding of security, encryption, access control, and compliance for enterprise-grade data environments.

• Exceptional communication and documentation skills — able to evangelize architecture and drive alignment across cross-functional teams.

• Able to travel 5-10%

Preferred

• Experience with security, IoT, or real-time telemetry systems (video, access control, sensor data, etc.).

• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK) and distributed tracing.

• Exposure to ML/AI pipelines, model training and serving architectures, or time-series analytics for anomaly detection.

• Experience designing for scalability across global deployments and regulatory zones.