Principal Systems Architect

Location
:
Hybrid
- New York or Metropark

Medidata follows a hybrid office policy in which employees who are hired for an in-person position are expected to work on site a certain number of days per week following Company policy.

Medidata is powering smarter treatments and healthier people through digital solutions to support clinical trials. Celebrating over 25 years of ground-breaking technological innovation across more than 38,000 trials and 12 million patients, Medidata offers industry-leading expertise, analytics-powered insights, and one of the largest clinical trial data sets in the industry. More than 1 million registered users across approximately 2,300 customers trust Medidata's seamless, end-to-end platform to improve patient experiences, accelerate clinical breakthroughs, and bring therapies to market faster.

A Dassault Systemes brand (Euronext Paris: FR0014003TT8, DSY.PA), Medidata is headquartered in New York City and has been recognized as a Leader by Everest Group and IDC. Discover more at  Listen to our latest podcast, from Dreamers to Disruptors, and follow us at @Medidata.

We are seeking a Principal Systems Architect to drive the end-to-end technical architecture across a multi-product, cloud-native SaaS platform undergoing enterprise modernization and AI enablement. Operating as an industry expert and key technical authority, you will navigate high ambiguity to establish multi-year architectural strategies, define target-state architecture, and build reference implementations adopted across the entire engineering organization.

This is a hands-on, senior individual contributor role for an organizational force multiplier - a "10x" engineer who demonstrates the power of one. You will align cross-functional priorities, solve critical enterprise challenges, and work shoulder-to-shoulder with teams from whiteboard to production, raising the standard of engineering excellence company-wide.

• Define end-to-end, outcome-based solutions across product lines and engineering domains - ensuring multi-system interoperability, alignment to enterprise architecture standards, and capability reuse.
• Author architectural blueprints and decision records; partner with Product Management to evaluate emerging technologies and translate business strategy into multi-year technical roadmaps.
• Design multi-tenant, event-driven, microservices systems at scale - messaging architectures, data partitioning strategies, and web APIs (REST, GraphQL) - setting enterprise standards for application security.
• Stay hands-on: build proofs of concept and reference implementations, review critical pull requests, and set engineering standards through working code - not just documents.
• Own AWS cloud architecture across container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS) and serverless (Lambda), standardizing the deployment lifecycle through Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Design enterprise-grade AI agents and LLM-powered capabilities - MCP-based services, orchestration, tool use, and evaluation - with human-in-the-loop governance; partner with Data teams to operationalize production ML.
• Lead complex legacy modernization and migration programs with phased, de-risked delivery strategies; advise executive leadership on technical risk assessment.
• Exercise wide autonomy to mentor senior and staff engineers, run cross-team architecture reviews, and resolve critical, enterprise-level challenges where precedent does not exist. Responsible for developing resolution to critical issue.

• Bachelor's degree with 15+ years of experience, Master's degree with 12+ years, or PhD with 8+ years in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Progressive software engineering background, including significant tenure at a Principal/Architect level shaping platform strategy.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java and Python, alongside broad multi-language proficiency.
• Proven history of designing resilient, high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines operating at scale.
• Hands-on mastery of cloud platforms (Kubernetes, serverless, Terraform/IaC) and modern data tooling.
• Direct experience operationalizing enterprise AI/LLM product capabilities, agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills-capable of translating architectural trade-offs for engineers, executive leadership, and compliance bodies.
• Exercises wide latitude in high-ambiguity environments to…