Key Responsibilities
Lead the technical review of Snowflake infrastructure SAP integration pipelines and the bronze/raw ingestion layer.
Assess identity federation and security models across Snowflake and Azure and define target-state access patterns.
Evaluate architectural options for native cross-cloud consumption including Azure-native access and Apache Iceberg feasibility.
Recommend ingestion tooling and standards for the silver-layer conformance pipelines.
Support the reference-pattern build with h ands-on platform configuration guidance (not implementation) for the pilot domain(s).
Ingestion mechanics: Snowpipe / Snowpipe Streaming, Kafka connector, batch vs. streaming trade-offs for bronze-layer loading
Performance/cost: clustering keys, search optimization service, query acceleration service, warehouse auto-suspend/scaling policy design
Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Event Hubs needs working knowledge of where these compete with vs. complement Snowflake
Cost and latency implications of Azure-native access to Snowflake-managed data vs. direct Snowflake consumption
Iceberg internals: metadata layer, catalog options (Snowflake Open Catalog/Polaris, AWS Glue, Nessie)
Multi-engine read/write patterns — Spark, Trino, Snowflake all reading the same Iceberg tables — since the whole point of adopting Iceberg is avoiding vendor lock-in for select gold products
External volumes and storage integration configuration
Infrastructure-as-code for Snowflake (Terraform provider, schema change or similar)
CI/CD pipeline design for data pipeline deployments
Required Experience & Skills
10+ years in cloud data platform architecture with deep current h ands-on Snowflake expertise (performance security data sharing and platform administration).
Working expertise in Azure-native data services and identity (Entra ID/Azure AD) integration patterns.
Practical exposure to Apache Iceberg or other open table formats in a production or reliable pilot context.
Experience assessing SAP-to-cloud integration pipelines from a platform (not functional/SAP-module) perspective.