About Infinitive
Infinitive is a data and AI consultancy that helps clients modernize, monetize, and operationalize their data to generate lasting value. They pride themselves on their deep industry and technology expertise, ensuring that they drive and sustain the adoption of new capabilities. Infinitive is committed to aligning their team with their clients' culture, ensuring a successful partnership by bringing the right mix of talent and skills for high return on investment.

Infinitive has earned recognition as one of the "Best Small Firms to Work For" by Consulting Magazine, receiving this accolade nine times, most recently in 2026. They have also been honored as a “Top Workplace” by the Washington Post, “Best Places to Work” by the Washington Business Journal, and “Best Places to Work” by Virginia Business.

About the Role

We are seeking a Technical Lead /Architect to define the technical vision, architectural strategy, and technical execution for our enterprise-wide, next-generation event-driven data platforms. In this role, you will act as the principal authority bridging ultra-high-throughput streaming topologies, stateful distributed workflow orchestration, and federated data governance.

You will spearhead our platform architecture centered around Apache Kafka for real-time event distribution and Temporal for durable execution and distributed state orchestration. A core mandate of this position is establishing enterprise data contracts, driving schema evolution frameworks, and designing resilient Lakehouse/warehouse architectures capable of serving high-concurrency analytical and operational workloads. As a technical leader, you will set the engineering standards, mentor senior talent, and align multi-team distributed systems initiatives with executive business priorities.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Strategy: Define the multi-year technical roadmap and reference architecture for our real-time streaming infrastructure, Lakehouse ingestion engines, and distributed orchestration layers.
Distributed Stream Topologies: Architect and govern multi-tenant, enterprise Apache Kafka ecosystems (producers, consumers, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry), ensuring sub-second latencies, exactly-once processing guarantees, and disaster recovery.
Data Contracts & Governance: Formulate and enforce company-wide data governance, schema design patterns, and automated contract testing (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema) across polyglot microservices, streaming pipelines, and storage boundaries.
Durable Orchestration & Transactional Integrity: Architect long-running, fault-tolerant workflow topologies using Temporal, standardizing complex distributed transaction patterns (e.g., Saga patterns, compensation logic, distributed state machines, human-in-the-loop flows).
Lakehouse & Analytical Engine Architecture: Direct the design and operational scaling of large-scale distributed computing workloads (Apache Spark / PySpark) and modern cloud Lakehouse platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery) using medallion architectures and dimensional/semantic models.
Operational Excellence & FinOps: Implement comprehensive observability platforms (tracing, telemetry, automated drift detection, data quality gates) while establishing cloud infrastructure cost optimization and capacity planning frameworks.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as the technical authority across platform and product teams; establish engineering excellence standards, drive RFC and Architecture Review Board (ARB) processes, and elevate senior engineering talent across the organization.

Required Experience

8+ years of professional experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or backend platform architecture, with 2+ years acting in a Lead, Principal / Architect capacity.
Durable Workflow & State Machine Architecture: Deep architectural experience with Temporal (or Cadence), including deterministic execution modeling, activity orchestration, workflow versioning strategies, signal/query handling, dynamic task routing, and cross-boundary error recovery.
Mastery of Streaming Systems: Deep foundational expertise with Apache Kafka internals (broker sizing, partition strategies, consensus mechanisms, custom connector development, consumer group rebalancing, and stateful stream processing via Kafka Streams or Flink).
Enterprise Data Contracts & Schema Engineering:
- Authority in schema specification frameworks (Apache Avro, Protocol Buffers/gRPC, JSON Schema).
- Hands-on leadership implementing schema registries (Confluent, AWS Glue) with automated CI/CD schema linting, breaking-change prevention, and backward/forward compatibility strategies.
- Experience standardizing automated data contract verification tooling (e.g., Great Expectations, Pandera, Pydantic, dbt tests, contract-testing frameworks).
Distributed Computing & Core Engineering: Advanced engineering capabilities in Python, Go, or Java/Scala, emphasizing distributed design patterns, concurrency models, and resilient microservice design. Extensive scale experience with Apache Spark / PySpark internals and query plan optimization.
Modern Lakehouse & Data Modeling: Expert-level knowledge of dimensional data modeling, Data Vault, or semantic layer design, with practical experience scaling multi-terabyte/petabyte systems on Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.
Cross-Functional Influence: Demonstrated track record of aligning distributed engineering teams around unified architectural patterns, authoring architectural decision records (ADRs), and influencing executive stakeholders.

Infinitive is required by law in some jurisdictions to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. The determination of this range includes various factors not limited to skill set, level, experience, relevant training, and licensure and certifications. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range for this role in the U.S. is $90,000 - $154,00.00.

Infinitive is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

About the company

Infinitive is a transformation and technology consultancy that helps global brands achieve measurable results through strategy, technology enablement, and organizational change. Its services combine deep industry and technology expertise with tailored team placements to drive adoption of new capabilities and deliver a high return on investment. The company emphasizes matching its people to a client’s culture and building the right mix of talent and skills to sustain impact. Infinitive differentiates itself through its recognized strong workplace culture, which has earned coverage and awards from outlets like Inc. magazine, The Washington Post, Consulting Magazine, and the Washington Business Journal, and by prioritizing practical outcomes over flashy promises. The goal is to empower clients to transform operations and technology systems in a way that yields lasting improvements and business value.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

Ashburn, Virginia

Founded

2003

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

Infinitive hosted Databricks events in June 2026, signaling active channel demand.
Infinitive published August 2026 content on agentic AI and policy management, showing momentum.
LeadIQ estimated 187 employees in August 2026, indicating a growing delivery bench.

What critics are saying

Databricks can disintermediate Infinitive by selling migration services directly in 2026.
At 187 employees, losing one anchor client crushes utilization and revenue quickly.
Consultancy demand for transformation work depends on enterprise budgets, now tightening in 2026.

What makes Infinitive unique

Infinitive is a Databricks Silver Tier Partner, validated in February 2026.
Infinitive sells niche data-migration accelerators for regulated enterprises, not generic staffing.
Infinitive’s workplace brand wins Consulting Magazine, Washington Post, and Washington Business Journal recognition.

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Benefits

Hybrid Work Options

Company News

Infinitive

Nov 7th, 2025

Data Migrations: How Infinitive Anticipates Challenges by Utilizing Databricks

Data migrations: how Infinitive anticipates challenges by utilizing Databricks. In a previous post, Infinitive, Inc. introduced the Infinitive Databricks Data Migration Accelerator, a strategic framework designed to fast-track your move to a modern lakehouse architecture. However, a successful migration isn't just about speed; it's about anticipating and mitigating the inevitable complexities that arise when moving foundational business data. Migrating financial or customer data, or any other type of sensitive data, can introduce risk to the operation efficiency of any organization. At Infinitive, Infinitive, Inc. leverage Databricks tools and its deep experience to proactively address these risks, transforming them from potential roadblocks into managed checkpoints. Data quality & testing. Risk: Inconsistent or poor-quality source data is the primary cause of downstream errors. Furthermore, verifying that millions of records have been accurately moved and transformed is often the most time-consuming part of the process. Proactive Solution: Part of its meta-data driven framework is performing automated data profiling and cleansing before the migration begins. Post-migration, Infinitive deploys its augmented Lakebridge data validation system to certify the data was not corrupted in transit. When put together, these rigorous quality checks ensure that your company's data is clean and consistent at key parts of the migration process. Additionally, its automated testing process reduces the amount of time spent manually validating records. Data scalability and latency. Risk: Migrating petabytes of data can overwhelm a target system, leading to performance degradation and cost spikes. Additionally, any disruption in data synchronized during the cutover window (data latency) could derail business operations. Proactive Solution: This is where Databricks Platform Capabilities shine. Infinitive, Inc. utilize the platform's massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and open-source Delta Lake data storage to handle large datasets efficiently without compromising performance. For minimizing data latency, Infinitive, Inc. implement Change Data Capture (CDC) strategies, using Databricks' streaming capabilities to keep the old and new platforms in sync right up to the final, low-impact cutover. Data Transformation and dependencies. Risk: Source and target schemas are rarely identical, making Data Transformation and Schema Mapping complex. Adding to this complexity, data rarely exists in a vacuum; understanding Data Dependencies & Referential Integrity is vital to ensure related records are moved in the correct sequence. Proactive Solution: One of the greatest advantages of an automatic, meta-data driven pipeline is that the process of building data pipelines is streamlined. Infinitive, Inc. only need to update the metadata files and configurations for multiple pipelines can be updated all in one place, streamlining ongoing maintenance. To tackle data dependencies, Infinitive, Inc. apply decades of experience in granular process mapping and documentation. This experience, along with Databrick's robust processing engine, allows Infinitive to execute complex, multi-stage transformations efficiently, ensuring referential integrity is maintained throughout the process. Risk: The fear of a prolonged outage during cutover and downtime is a major deterrent for many organizations. Proactive Solution: Infinitive can prevent outages by provisioning the lakehouse as a parallel system to your company's current data solutions. Infinitive, Inc. then replicate your data and dependencies in Databricks until your systems are fully functional in the new environment, at which point Infinitive, Inc. will seamlessly cutover. This methodology ensures little downtime and no outages, so your company can still work as usual while the migration takes place. Risk: data security & compliance with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA already cause many companies headaches, even without trying to migrate data systems. Proactive Solution: For security, Infinitive, Inc. utilize Databricks Platform capabilities like Unity Catalog that are compliant with HIPAA, FEDRAMP High, IRAP, and many other regulatory standards. Additionally, Databricks itself is a GDPR compliant organization, and their platform can easily be configured to provide GDPR compliant services. Migrating your company's foundational data doesn't have to be a high-stakes gamble. At Infinitive, Infinitive, Inc. understand that minimizing risk, from ensuring data quality and managing scalability to preserving referential integrity and guaranteeing compliance, is just as important as the speed of your transition. By combining the powerful features of the Databricks Platform with its decades of practical industry experience and automation framework, Infinitive, Inc. transform data migration from a daunting challenge into a predictable, managed process. Stop letting the fear of downtime and data inconsistency keep you tied to legacy systems. Take the first step toward a more secure, efficient, and scalable lakehouse architecture and contact Infinitive today.

PR Newswire

Apr 14th, 2023

Infinitive Announces New Retail Media First Party Data Analytics And M

“We have over 20+ years consulting in the retail and media space and understand the business and technology challenges our clients face daily.” said Denis McFarlane, CEO of Infinitive. “We are pleased to be able to help businesses optimize their First Party data to increase their revenue.” . .