Snowflake Architect · Enterprise Data
John Y. Miller
Enterprise Data Architecture · Data Warehousing · Governance
Snowflake · Azure · AWS · dbt · Cortex AI
Engagements: contract · fractional · remote or SF Bay Area onsite
13 wk
Secure Snowflake platform carried dev → prod for a bank
~$2M/yr
Saved for an asset manager by redesigning data sharing
2
U.S. patents in data quality (incl. ML rule generation)
25+ yrs
Across financial services, public sector & enterprise
Summary
Snowflake and enterprise data architect with 25+ years across financial services, public sector, and
enterprise clients. Former Snowflake Senior Solution Architect and resident architect at leading
financial institutions; I design and deliver secure, governed data warehouse, lakehouse, and
data-mesh platforms on Snowflake, Azure, and AWS — with deep governance, security, and compliance
practice. I translate business needs into data solutions and provide technical leadership to data
engineering and analytics teams. Two U.S. patents in data quality; organizer of the
Snowflake Bay Area Users Group.
Core Skills
Data Architecture
Enterprise data architectureData modeling
Warehouse / lake / lakehouseData mesh
MedallionSemantic models
Data contractsData sharingIntegration
Snowflake
SQLTasksStreams
Dynamic TablesStages · PipesCatalogs · Iceberg
dbt · SchemaChangeCortex AI (Agents · Search · Analyst)
Turnkey EDW provisioningPerformance & cost
Cloud & Data Eng
Azure (Synapse · ADF · Fabric · ADLS Gen2 · DevOps · Entra ID)
AWS (S3 · Athena)GCP
Python · Bash · SparkTalend · Matillion · Fivetran · Airflow
ETL / ELT · CI/CD
Governance & Access
Two-layer RBAC (13 principles)Policies · tags · masking · row-access
SSO (SAML2) / SCIMPrivateLink
SOX · CCPA · GDPRCollibra · Alation · OpenMetadata · BigID · Informatica
BI & Analytics
Power BITableauCortex AnalystSemantic models
AI-Native / Agentic
Agent harnesses (Skills · SubAgents · Memory)
Claude Code · OpenAI Codex · Cortex Code
RAGKnowledge graphs · taxonomies
Experience
Milbird — Founder
January 2025 – Present
San Francisco, CA
- Designed and delivered a secure, governed Snowflake platform for a commercial bank in a 13-week dev-to-prod engagement: Azure AD SSO + SCIM (SAML2), two-layer RBAC (20 custom roles, 3,700+ grants), 4-layer defense in depth, and a dbt medallion foundation whose parameterized scripts stand up prod from the same source as non-prod.
- Turned unstructured lending documents into a Snowflake-native, AI-powered data asset for a healthcare-practice lender — pipeline processed 67 documents, normalized 460 terms to 25, and shipped 4 live Snowflake-native AI apps (a Cortex Agent, a Cortex Search service, Cortex Analyst over semantic views, and a Streamlit app), packaged as a reusable knowledge-discovery framework.
BBI — VP Strategy
March 2023 – February 2024
San Francisco, CA
- Stood up BBI's Snowflake Solutions practice; reached Snowflake Select Partner status with a new sales and delivery capability.
- Led a Snowflake architecture assessment for a Travel & Entertainment client and solution architecture for a credit-bureau services provider in financial services.
- Delivered AI-integrated data governance (OpenMetadata + generative AI), an internal data marketplace with data contracts, and a LangChain/Streamlit RAG system for internal knowledge access.
Snowflake — Senior Solution Architect, Financial Services Strategy
June 2021 – March 2023
San Francisco, CA
- Served as Resident Solution Architect and Technical Account Manager for financial-services clients including City National Bank, DTCC, MetaBank, and New American Funding.
- Designed and executed Snowflake data strategy, architecture, and roadmaps aligning the platform to business goals.
- Delivered best-practice engagements across governance, security, cost management, data engineering, and access management; saved an asset-management client ~$2M/year by redesigning data sharing.
Accenture — Data Strategy, Solution Architect & Data Engineering
June 2019 – May 2021
San Francisco Bay Area · joined via Clarity Insights (acquired by Accenture, June 2020)
- Data program lead for a utility: delivered the data platform driving customers to a conversational-AI chatbot, cutting handled call volume and cost to serve (Genesys, Oracle, Informatica, Cognos, SQL, Python).
- Solution lead for a wealth-management firm: designed and built governed self-serve analytics, reducing outage risk and cost (AWS, Snowflake, Denodo, Tableau, Cloudera, SQL Server).
- Technical architect for an insurer: migrated Teradata to Snowflake with Informatica under data-governance requirements.
Silicon Valley Data Solutions Group — Founder & Solution Architect
December 2017 – 2019
San Francisco Bay Area · independent consulting practice (continued intermittently through 2024)
- Led incorporation of Azure data and analytics services into a global bank's data-science teams — a compliant, auditable, repeatable platform (Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake).
- Added automation and auditing to model-development processes to meet bank regulations (FastScore, Airflow, Spark, Jupyter); led machine learning for muni-bond pricing enabling price-transparency compliance.
- Delivered data governance for statewide contact-center KPIs on a State of California CCaaS rollout — cross-team profiling and validation plus an automated toolkit on Snowflake, AWS Athena, Tableau, and Python.
Camus Group, LLC — Founder
December 2015 – June 2017
San Francisco Bay Area
- Founded a practice connecting Bay Area data / data-science startups into the Fortune 500; clients included Accenture, EY, Trifacta, Diyotta, and OSIsoft.
Accenture — Partner, Global Chief Architect – Data Insights R&D
September 2008 – July 2015
Toronto, Canada & San Francisco, CA
- Built the Accenture Data Supply Chain architecture — integrating Hadoop, NoSQL, and web-scale tech with classic warehouse/lake design — plus a globally adopted data-literacy curriculum.
- Created the Data Quality Rules Accelerator, an AI/ML technique generating data-quality rules from existing data, adopted into smart-grid architecture and at enterprise clients (basis for two U.S. patents).
Earlier: Global CTO, Energy Practice — Information Management, HP (2007–2008) · CTO, Knightsbridge Solutions (1999–2007) · Senior Consultant, Emergent (1997–1998) · Systems Engineer, IBM (1993–1997)
Leadership & Community
- Organizer, Snowflake Bay Area Users Group
- VP of Programs & Board Member, DAMA Los Angeles; Host, "DAMA LA Presents"
- Board Member, DAMA San Francisco Bay Area
Education
- Simon Fraser University — B.A.Sc., Computer Engineering (1987–1993)
- Northwestern University — Executive Education: Leading High-Impact Teams (2000)
Languages
English (native) · French (professional working)
Certifications
- Snowflake SnowPro Core
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- Snowflake DCDF (training badge)
- Google Generative AI Fundamentals · Responsible AI · CD & DevOps
Patents
- US 8,412,735 — Automated data-quality rule generation (conditional functional dependencies)
- US 8,666,919 — Data quality management: profiling, linking, cleansing & migration