Cassandra Architect

Key Responsibilities-

• Review the existing Cassandra implementation and data model, recommending improvements to meet latency, availability, and scalability requirements.
• Define multi-region Cassandra architecture, including replication strategies, consistency levels, failover mechanisms, and capacity planning.
• Establish best practices for the Java data access layer using the DataStax Java Driver, including configuration, load balancing, retry policies, and query patterns.
• Identify and mitigate performance and data consistency risks, including hot partitions, oversized partitions, tombstones, and consistency anomalies.
• Design zero-downtime, no-data-loss migration strategies from relational databases to Cassandra using approaches such as Change Data Capture (CDC), dual writes, and shadow reads.
• Guide the development of customer-operated migration, data validation, and verification tools.
• Define performance testing strategies and benchmarks for validating latency, throughput, and reliability across regions.
• Recommend operational best practices for compaction, repair, monitoring, backup, and recovery.
• Document architecture decisions, technical standards, and implementation guidelines.
• Mentor engineers and provide guidance through architecture reviews, design discussions, and code reviews.

Required Skills and Experience

• 8+ years of hands-on production experience with Apache Cassandra, including architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning at scale.
• Strong experience designing and implementing multi-region Cassandra deployments for high availability and low latency.
• Proven experience planning and guiding zero-downtime, no-data-loss migrations from relational databases to Cassandra.
• Experience integrating Cassandra into applications originally designed for relational database systems.
• Deep knowledge of the DataStax Java Driver and Java-based database access patterns.
• Strong understanding of Cassandra replication, consistency models, partition design, query optimization, and failure handling.
• Proven consulting experience, with the ability to ramp up quickly, work independently, and enable engineering teams to maintain solutions after the engagement.