Christensen Farms is one of the largest, family-owned pork producers in the United States, marketing approximately 3 million hogs per year. Headquartered in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, the company operates throughout the Midwest with facilities in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, and South Dakota. Christensen Farms owns four feed mills, manages 145,000 sows on 44 farms, and oversees more than 350 nurseries and grow-finish sites. The company employees nearly 1,000 people and maintains 1,500 contract partnerships.

The company is vertically integrated with a strong presence across the pork value chain - from farm to fork. Christensen Farms is the largest shareholder of Triumph Foods LLC, a producer-owned primary pork processing plant in St. Joseph, Missouri. In turn, Triumph Food members own 50 percent of Daily's Premium Meats, a specialty pork processor bacon and other premium pork products. Triumph Foods also holds a 50 percent partnership in Seaboard Triumph Foods, LLC of Sioux City, Iowa, a primary pork processing plant.

Position Overview & Responsibilities

The Data Architect is responsible for visualizing and designing the organizations enterprise data management framework. This individual will work closely with cross functional teams to continuously optimize timelines, processes, and system automation in supporting management reporting and analytical processes. You will be an advocate for the effective use of data and lead a culture of data-informed decision making. Additionally, this position serves as level 3 employee support for decision science services across the organization.

Major Areas of Accountability

• Defining the data architecture framework, standards, and principles, including modeling, metadata, security, reference data, and master data.
• Develop business relationships. Understand business problems and work with the team to solve them through data and analytics. Collaborate and build relationships across all levels of the organization.
• Translating business requirements into technical specifications, including data streams, integrations, transformations, databases, and data lakes.
• Defining reference architecture, which is a pattern others can follow to create and improve data systems.
• Defining data flows including which parts of the organization generate data, which require data to function, how data flows are managed, and how data changes in transition.
• Provides 3rd level employee support for decision science services.
• Works closely with application and technical teams to ensure that current and future services meet data architecture requirements.
• Research tools, disciplines and industry trends and recommend improvements for team or company consideration.
• Advocate, proliferate, and educate the business on the data assets we have and how to leverage data for decision making.
• Other duties assigned within the scope, responsibility, and requirements of the job.

Education, Training and Experience Requirements:

• Minimum formal education required: Bachelor's degree in data and analytics or an IT related discipline or 6+ years of equivalent work experience.
• 2 or more years of experience in a corporate IT Team environment.
• Exceptional technical skills required. Cloud based tools (Power BI, Data Factory, Databricks, Snowflake, H20.ai, Excel, database management, etc.). Programming/scripting experience (SQL and HTML) and working knowledge of the software development life cycle.
• Clear, concise, and precise written and verbal communication skills to effectively communicate with people of various backgrounds including non-technical audiences.
• Strong solution-oriented approach to team problem solving.
• Ability to multi-task and to prioritize objectives, anticipate situations and take quick action.
• Computer skills required: Working knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite including Visio
• Strict adherence to company confidentiality and ethical standards.

Additional Desirable Skills/Qualifications

• Certifications in any of the following are a plus: Data Architecture (DASCA, TOGAF, etc.), ITIL.
• Artificial intelligence technologies (Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, etc.).
• Enterprise application experience
• Cloud technologies (Public, Private, Dedicated, Hybrid).
• Experience in Level 2 and/or Level 3 employee support (Freshservice or similar ITSM tool).
• Employee computing devices including Windows, Android, and iOS.
• Experience working in an agricultural business, particularly the swine industry.