Cloud & Data Platform Architect

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Clearance Required:

Position Summary:

The Cloud & Data Platform Architect, Life Sciences Technology, is responsible for defining and governing the secure, scalable data platform foundations that enable analytics, AI, and digital solutions across commercial, market access, patient services, and medical affairs functions.

This role owns cloud modernization architecture, lakehouse design, ingestion frameworks, data governance alignment, and DataOps standards required to operationalize life sciences data in regulated environments. The architect ensures platforms are secure, resilient, cost-efficient, and production-ready — providing a reliable foundation for downstream analytics, GenAI applications, and enterprise integrations. This role balances hands-on technical design with architectural governance, ensuring consistent standards and repeatable patterns across engagements.

What You Will Do:

• Define and maintain cloud modernization architecture standards, guiding principles, including network design, IAM/RBAC models, encryption, key management, logging, and audit controls.
• Architect scalable lakehouse data platforms with medallion architecture principles (raw → curated → consumable layers) optimized for analytics and AI workloads.
• Design ingestion and integration patterns supporting batch, streaming, and change data capture (CDC) across structured and semi-structured datasets.
• Establish enterprise-grade DataOps practices, including CI/CD for pipelines, infrastructure-as-code standards, automated testing, environment promotion strategies, and release governance.
• Define data quality frameworks, validation rules, reconciliation controls, and lineage standards to ensure trust and auditability.
• Optimize platform performance, cost management, scalability, and reliability across cloud environments.

• Define and enforce operational standards, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and reliability targets for data pipelines and services.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Solution Architect on cross-system integration patterns and non-functional requirement alignment.
• Partner with Functional Architect to ensure business definitions are accurately reflected in physical and logical data models.
• Mentor data engineers and provide architectural oversight across multiple delivery workstreams.
• Develop reusable platform accelerators, reference architectures, ingestion templates, and governance playbooks to increase delivery velocity and consistency.

What You Will Need:

• 8–11 years of experience in data engineering and cloud platform architecture.
• 3+ years designing and governing enterprise-grade cloud data platforms.
• Strong experience with Azure or AWS data ecosystems and lakehouse architectures (e.g., ADLS/S3, Databricks, Snowflake, or similar platforms).
• Experience designing ingestion frameworks using ELT/CDC patterns and distributed processing models.
• Expert Data Modelling skills in designing data marts, data products and semantic data models.
• Strong understanding of secure cloud architecture principles, including IAM, encryption, and auditability.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code for data platforms.
• Experience defining operational metrics and monitoring strategies for production data platforms.
• Ability to lead architectural discussions and guide distributed engineering teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or related discipline.

What Would Be Nice To Have:

• Experience supporting life sciences or other regulated industry data ecosystems.
• Familiarity with syndicated US pharma commercial datasets, CRM integrations, or specialty pharmacy/HUB data flows.
• Experience with real-time streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka or equivalent).
• Experience implementing data governance tools (catalog, lineage, data quality monitoring).
• Databricks or Snowflake cloud or data platform certifications.

What We Offer:

Guidehouse offers a comprehensive, total rewards package that includes competitive compensation and a flexible benefits package that reflects our commitment to creating a diverse and supportive workplace.

About Guidehouse

Guidehouse is an Equal Opportunity Employer–Protected Veterans, Individuals with Disabilities or any other basis protected by law, ordinance, or regulation.

Guidehouse will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable law or ordinance including the Fair Chance Ordinance of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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