Director, Architecture
About this role
Syneos Health® is a leading fully-integrated life sciences services organization built to accelerate customer success. We partner with innovators at every point across the drug development and commercialization continuum, helping them navigate complexity, anticipate change and accelerate progress.
Every day we perform better because of how we work together, as one team, each the best at what we do. We bring together talented experts across a broad spectrum of business critical corporate functions. Every role plays an essential part in enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our teams are agile, collaborative, and committed to delivering—for each other, for our customers, and ultimately for the people who rely on the services we support.
Discover what your 25,000 future colleagues already know:
Why Syneos Health
• We are passionate about developing our people, through career development and progression; supportive and engaged line management; technical and therapeutic area training; peer recognition and total rewards program.
• We are committed to building an inclusive culture – where you can authentically be yourself. Central to this is our purpose – Driven to Deliver – which captures the passion of our colleagues to show up each day and shape solutions that have the ability to dramatically impact someone’s life.
• We are continuously building the company we all want to work for and our customers want to work with. Why? Because we know that when we bring together smart colleagues from across the world, we can shape the future of healthcare, driving impact for customers and defining the pace of patient progress.
Job Responsibilities
Job Summary
The Director Cloud Architecture serves as the enterprise cloud design authority, owning architecture decisions, standards, and guardrails across all cloud environments to ensure resiliency, security, and scale by design. This role defines cloud architecture strategy and reference architecture; establishes availability, dependency, resiliency, and disaster recovery patterns upfront; and translates architectural intent into enforceable guardrails through policy as code. Partnering closely with Engineering and Infrastructure, the Principal Engineer reviews and shapes platform designs, drives consistent architecture governance, and enables delivery teams to build compliant, repeatable solutions through clear standards and approved patterns.
Core Responsibilities
Own cloud architecture strategy, reference architectures, and engineering standards across Azure/AWS/GCP/OCI and hybrid environments, with strong PaaS patterns and guidance.
Define resiliency, disaster recovery, security, availability, and dependency patterns upfront (including target SLAs/SLOs) and socialize them through clear design artifacts.
Translate architectural intent into enforceable guardrails, including policy as code, blueprinting, and paved-road patterns that reduce variation and rework.
Review and shape platform and product designs in partnership with Engineering and Infrastructure, ensuring alignment to standards and documented risk tradeoffs.
Establish and run consistent architecture governance (design reviews, decision records, exception process, and lifecycle updates to standards).
Lead dependency modeling and risk assessments for critical services, driving pragmatic recommendations that balance resiliency, cost, performance, and delivery timelines.
Define cloud landing-zone and platform guardrails (networking, identity, encryption, logging/monitoring) and ensure they are adoptable by delivery teams.
Influence through standards: coach teams, create reusable templates and reference implementations, and drive alignment without becoming a delivery bottleneck.
Additional Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience); advanced degree preferred.
Deep multi-cloud architecture experience (Azure, AWS, GCP and OCI), including strong PaaS exposure and experience designing secure, scalable platform patterns.
Demonstrated credibility as a design authority across engineering and operations teams, with a track record of driving adoption of standards and reference architectures.
Strong grasp of resiliency engineering, disaster recovery, availability patterns, dependency modeling, and risk tradeoffs (cost/performance/reliability).
Hands-on experience translating architecture into enforceable guardrails (policy as code, landing zone controls, standardized pipelines/templates, and exception management).
Strong security architecture fundamentals (identity, network segmentation, encryption, logging/monitoring) and familiarity with regulated/audit-driven environments.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence through standards, coach teams, and align stakeholders on architectural decisions.
Years of experience: 10-12 years of experience
Get to know Syneos Health
Over the past 5 years, we have worked with 94% of all Novel FDA Approved Drugs, 95% of EMA Authorized Products and over 200 Studies across 73,000 Sites and 675,000+ Trial patients.
No matter what your role is, you’ll take the initiative and challenge the status quo with us in a highly competitive and ever-changing environment. Learn more about Syneos Health.
Additional Information
Tasks, duties, and responsibilities as listed in this job description are not exhaustive. The Company, at its sole discretion and with no prior notice, may assign other tasks, duties, and job responsibilities. Equivalent experience, skills, and/or education will also be considered so qualifications of incumbents may differ from those listed in the Job Description. The Company, at its sole discretion, will determine what constitutes as equivalent to the qualifications described above. Further, nothing contained herein should be construed to create an employment contract. Occasionally, required skills/experiences for jobs are expressed in brief terms. Any language contained herein is intended to fully comply with all obligations imposed by the legislation of each country in which it operates, including the implementation of the EU Equality Directive, in relation to the recruitment and employment of its employees. The Company is committed to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including the provision of reasonable accommodations, when appropriate, to assist employees or applicants to perform the essential functions of the job.
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