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 ad...

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis.