A Data Architect Close to Data Swamps and Mountain Trails

What does a Data Architect actually do all day? For Sânziana, the answer starts somewhere between a data swamp and a mountain trail. Actually, this contrast tells you more about her than any job title could. Sânziana has spent her career moving between banking, retail, and now international manufacturing – always at the intersection of raw data and business sense. Today she works as one of Zeren’s senior consultants, leading a Business Intelligence engagement for a large manufacturing client in the Nordics.

From tool to language

Her relationship with data started at university.  It has never really stopped since then. “Every job, every freelance project, revolved around data,” she says. “How we load it, how we transform it, how we use it to produce reports that are genuinely useful to the business.”

But over time, something shifted. She moved from the mechanics of loading and structuring data to something harder to describe.

“I moved from simply loading data to understanding what it could do for people. That shift – from technician to translator – is what I enjoy most.”

The magic that isn’t magic

Ask someone outside IT how data gets into a dashboard. Fost probably, the honest answer is usually: “I assumed it just… appears.” Sânziana has heard this many times.

“The most challenging part is helping them understand it’s a multi-step process,” she explains. Sources that seem completely unrelated – CRM data, supply chain systems, financial records – all have to be pulled together, profiled, cleaned, and reshaped before a single chart renders. Load everything without care, and you end up in what the industry calls a data swamp.

“It may look like magic. But it’s really the combined work of many people, each with their own specialism, working across multiple layers before anything reaches the business.”

On Zeren

Eventually, Sânziana came to Zeren looking for something her network couldn’t give her: access to projects at a different scale.

“Zeren opened my horizon toward international projects – more complex engagements, for clients I wouldn’t or couldn’t have reached on my own.”

In fact, if she had to explain Zeren to a fellow data architect in plain terms:

“For the freelancer who wants to grow beyond their existing network, Zeren opens doors. To interesting clients, new industries, projects you’d never have found alone.”

Off the clock

Lastly, away from the data warehouse, Sânziana follows advice from an unlikely source – her son. “I go outside to touch grass, as he says. Look at the sky, go for a hike. I love the mountains. That’s my antistress ritual — nature and the mountains.”

Indeed, the people building the infrastructure modern business runs on are also the people with many hills to climb and skies to look at.