Position: Lead Data Architect

Location: New York City (Hybrid) or Remote

Salary Range: $150-180K for NYC-based hires, dependent on experience

About Curacity

Curacity is a demand creation platform that helps travel brands measure revenue from upper-funnel marketing. By delivering premium content to opt-in subscribers of trusted media brands, Curacity enables hotels, resorts, and cruises to reach high-intent travelers during the inspiration phase, before they make purchase decisions. Its attribution technology closes the loop between marketing and bookings, identifying which media-exposed guests ultimately book a stay. Curacity empowers travel marketers to make smarter decisions with data by directly linking content to revenue. Named among Inc. 5000's top 20 travel and hospitality companies and Digiday's Best Content Marketing Platform of 2024, Curacity has its headquarters in New York with offices in Stamford, Conn., Toronto, and Buenos Aires.

Role Overview

Curacity is modernizing its data platform, moving away from a monolithic pipeline to a modular, warehouse-first architecture, entirely within Azure. This is not a greenfield build; it's a piecewise migration of a live system, standing up new components incrementally while keeping existing operations running.

This role will own the end-to-end technical vision for this transformation: designing the systems, sequencing the migration, making the foundational decisions, and staying hands-on through implementation. You'll work directly alongside an embedded engineering team and external technology partners to turn a complex, phased modernization into a reliable, scalable foundation for the business.

This is a high-stakes role at a real inflection point. Curacity is investing in modernizing its data platform, moving from a monolithic architecture to a reliable, modular, warehouse-first system, with production running throughout the transition. The migration is piecewise by design: new components will be stood up alongside existing ones, with data and workloads cut over in phases. This person needs to be comfortable sequencing that kind of transition, not just designing for the end state.

You'll work in a collaborative build model alongside an external technology partner and own the internal team's technical direction. The role reports into engineering leadership with visibility at the executive level, given the centrality of this initiative to the business.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Design

• Define and own the overall data architecture (ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers) within the Azure ecosystem
• Lead the design of a medallion-style data warehouse (Snowflake on Azure or an Azure-native equivalent) to replace the current monolithic pipeline
• Sequence the migration so new components can go live incrementally without disrupting production; this is a piecewise transition, not a cutover
• Design a decoupled pipeline architecture that separates ETL processing from dashboard serving
• Establish PII handling strategies for analytics environments that separate sensitive data from operational models
• Architect the Curacity Traveler ID model, the entity linking hotel guest records, subscriber data, and booking outcomes

Pipeline & Ingestion

• Design normalized ingestion across a heterogeneous landscape of hotel PMS systems, including API integrations, push methods, and file-based feeds
• Architect publisher/ESP engagement data ingestion (opens, clicks, unique opens, MAUs) with format normalization across a growing network
• Define the real-time and batch processing strategy for metrics at scale

Reliability & Observability

• Design proactive monitoring and alerting to detect and prevent data quality failures before they reach downstream systems
• Define automated data quality, QA, and reprocessing capabilities so issues are caught before reaching production
• Establish telemetry coverage across the full pipeline: VM health, API availability, storage limits, memory, and integration timeouts
• Design onboarding validation workflows for new hotels and publishers so data is reliable from day one

Intelligence & Analytics Foundation

• Architect the behavioral data modeling layer to capture and analyze travel intent signals, booking patterns, and engagement behaviors in support of personalization and optimization
• Enable internal analyst self-service and ad hoc querying without engineering dependency
• Design canonical data models that preserve the full richness of source data rather than normalizing to the lowest common denominator across systems

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years in data engineering or data architecture roles, with at least 2-3 years in a lead or principal capacity
• Proven experience leading incremental migrations of legacy data pipelines, able to sequence a piecewise transition without disrupting live systems
• Demonstrated experience designing large-scale data warehouse architectures: medallion (bronze/silver/gold) patterns, Snowflake, Databricks, or Azure-native equivalents (Synapse, Fabric)
• Hands-on experience with Azure as the primary cloud environment; familiarity with relevant services (Azure Data Factory, Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake, etc.)
• Deep experience with ETL/ELT pipeline design across heterogeneous source systems, not just cloud-to-cloud but messy real-world integrations
• Strong track record building for reliability: automated data quality, observability, failure alerting, and reprocessing, not just happy-path engineering
• Experience with multi-touch attribution, behavioral event pipelines, or similar systems where data accuracy has direct business consequences
• Comfort operating as a hands-on technical leader: reviewing and writing code, not just drawing diagrams
• Experience mentoring and upskilling engineers, with a track record of raising the technical bar of the teams they work with

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in hospitality tech, ad tech, or any domain involving PMS/CRM data normalization across many systems
• Background in pixel event processing, identity resolution, or probabilistic matching at scale
• Prior experience as a technical lead or architect in a vendor-assisted platform modernization, able to evaluate proposals rather than simply accept them
• Familiarity with data commercialization and building data products beyond internal reporting

Why Curacity?

You’ll join an award-winning, fast-growing team at the intersection of luxury travel and cutting-edge ad tech. We offer competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and the opportunity to shape the future of hospitality marketing.

What We Offer

Curacity offers a competitive package which includes base salary and comprehensive benefits, including:

• Healthcare: Comprehensive medical and dental insurance plans, long-term disability policy, generous company contribution
• Retirement: 401(k) match – up to 4% of your total eligible compensation matched dollar-for-dollar (US-based employees)
• Flexibility: Hybrid Work for NYC-Based Roles: Virtual (2 Days); In-office (3 Days); Multiple “work from anywhere” periods/year
• PTO: Generous PTO policy, in addition to 10+ public holiday closure dates
• Wellness: $100 monthly stipend for health and wellness-related activities
• Recognition: Birthday, anniversary, and other everyday surprises and gifts to recognize the hard work of our team members
• Culture: Casual, collaborative (and dog-friendly!) work environment in the heart of Flatiron with CWJ cold brew on tap

Equal Opportunity

Curacity is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

We encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply, and we provide reasonable accommodations during the hiring process for individuals with disabilities, upon request.