Director, IT Scientific Solutions Architect

Job Description

The Director, IT Scientific Solutions Architect leads the architectural vision and direction for R&D digital platforms, ensuring the design and evolution of cloud native, interoperable, and scalable technology ecosystems that enable modern scientific research.

This role serves as the architectural authority for Research IT, setting standards, defining future state architectures, and governing solution design across lab systems, data platforms, automation, and analytics. The Director is accountable for ensuring that R&D solutions are secure, modular, API driven, and reusable, accelerating digital delivery while reducing long term technical debt across the Research portfolio.

• Lead and own the target state architecture for R&D digital platforms, establishing clear architectural direction aligned with Research and enterprise IT strategy.
• Define and govern enterprise grade architecture standards, reference architectures, and design principles for Research solutions.
• Ensure architectural decisions support scalability, interoperability, and long term sustainability across scientific domains.

• Lead the design of integration patterns across ELN, LIMS, SDMS, lab automation/robotics, data platforms, and analytics ecosystems.
• Establish and enforce use of APIs, event driven architectures, and standardized interfaces to enable reuse and composability.
• Ensure platforms and integrations are designed to support data and compute intensive research workloads.

• Provide architectural leadership to ensure Research platforms are built on approved enterprise cloud services and platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure).
• Set direction for the use of managed services, storage, compute, and integration technologies, balancing agility, cost, and compliance.
• Ensure architectural designs meet expectations for availability, reliability, performance, and resilience.

• Govern solution architecture across the Research IT portfolio, reviewing and approving designs to ensure alignment with target architectures.
• Translate architectural vision into clear, actionable solution patterns and implementation guidance for delivery teams.
• Provide executive level architectural guidance during complex implementations, migrations, and integrations.

• Lead architectural alignment with data strategy, ensuring solutions support data products, harmonized data models, metadata, and lineage.
• Ensure architectures integrate cleanly with enterprise data governance and harmonization capabilities.
• Accountable for ensuring solutions meet security, privacy, and regulatory (GxP/GMP) requirements in collaboration with security and compliance teams.

• Establish and drive adoption of reusable architectural components and integration patterns across Research IT.
• Identify systemic architectural risks and lead remediation of technical debt that limits scalability, interoperability, or compliance.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and platforms, setting architectural direction for adoption where appropriate.

• Serve as the primary architectural leader and advisor to Product Owners, Scientific Leaders, and Research IT leadership.
• Provide architectural leadership for RFPs, vendor evaluations, and strategic sourcing decisions.
• Hold vendors accountable to architectural standards and ensure proposed solutions align with Research and enterprise direction.

• Establishes a cohesive, cloud native, and interoperable Research technology architecture.
• Accelerates digital innovation while reducing architectural fragmentation and technical debt.
• Enables Research teams to scale data, automation, and analytics capabilities with confidence.
• Ensures every R&D technology investment advances the organization toward its future state digital research vision.

We are a company committed to creating diverse and inclusive environments where people can bring their full, authentic selves to work every day. We are an equal opportunity/affirmative…