Udemy – Data Architecture Mastery: Think Like Senior Data Architect

Most data engineers can build pipelines. Few can architect systems that survive scale, regulation, cost pressure, and the next paradigm shift. This course closes that gap. Data Architecture Mastery teaches you to think like a senior data architect — not by memorizing tools, but by building a repeatable decision framework you can apply to any stack, any workload, and any constraint.

What you’ll learn:

• Decompose any business requirement into six architectural constraint dimensions and use a weighted scoring framework to make defensible technology decisions
• Evaluate storage paradigms — data warehouse, data lake, lakehouse, data mesh, and data fabric — and choose the right one for your workload
• Navigate modern data paradigms: evaluate lakehouse architecture, open table formats, real-time OLAP engines, columnar storage, and medallion architecture — and know when each is the right call versus a legacy warehouse
• Architect pipeline patterns across batch ETL/ELT, streaming, CDC, Lambda, Kappa, and Zero ETL
• Apply data modeling paradigms — Kimball star schema, Inmon 3NF, Data Vault 2.0, MDM, SCD and One Big Table — to the right use case
• Build AI-ready platforms with RAG pipelines, embedding architectures, feature stores, and agentic AI systems
• Design the serving layer: semantic layers, data contracts, materialized views, and reverse ETL
• Model total cost of ownership, apply hot/warm/cold storage tiering, and use FinOps practices to prevent runaway cloud spend
• Define SLOs with error budgets, design for failure with chaos engineering, and build production-grade observability into your pipelines
• Implement privacy by design, data classification, active metadata, policy-as-code, access control architectures, and GDPR/CCPA compliance patterns
• Apply Strangler Fig, Blue-Green deployment, and Parallel Run patterns for zero-risk platform migrations
• Align architecture with team structure using Conway’s Law, and avoid the most costly anti-patterns seen in production systems
• Document every decision using the Architecture Decision Canvas — a portfolio artifact you keep and build on after the course