Principal Enterprise Architect - Research Technology

Senior Principal Enterprise Architect - Research Technology serves as the enterprise architecture authority for Penn Medicine’s academic, clinical, and translational research technology domains. This senior individual contributor role is responsible for developing and stewarding the enterprise research technology strategy, defining reference architectures and standards for research platforms, and ensuring architectural coherence across Penn Medicine’s complex and federated research technology landscape. This role operates at the intersection of academic research, enterprise IT, data governance, and regulatory compliance. It balances researcher flexibility and autonomy with enterprise level sustainability, security, and compliance. The person in this role must be credible with senior research faculty, Principal Investigators, research administration leadership, and IT executive stakeholders, and must operate effectively through influence, standards, and governance rather than direct authority., * Defines and maintains the enterprise research technology architecture strategy and multi-year roadmap, aligned to Penn Medicine’s academic, clinical, translational, and population health research missions.

• Develops and publishes reference architectures, patterns, and standards for research technology platforms, including laboratory information systems, clinical trial management systems, research data repositories, electronic data capture (EDC) platforms, and investigator-initiated research tools.
• Assesses the current-state research technology landscape, identifies architectural fragmentation and redundancy, and develops a rationalization and modernization path that balances researcher flexibility with enterprise sustainability.
• Defines the architecture for the research data lifecycle - spanning ingest, curation, quality, analysis, sharing, and archiving - ensuring alignment with enterprise data platforms (EDC), cloud environments, and AI/analytics capabilities.
• Establishes architectural guardrails and standards for research data governance, including data classification, de-identification frameworks, Data Use Agreement (DUA) compliance, and data sharing architectures for NIH-funded and multi-institutional research collaborations.
• Architects technical integration pathways between research data environments and enterprise clinical, operational, and analytics platforms, enabling compliant translational research workflows.
• Ensures that research technology architectures meet applicable regulatory requirements, including HIPAA, Common Rule, 21 CFR Part 11, NIH data management and sharing policies, and institutional IRB and compliance standards.
• Partners with IRB, Research Compliance, and Privacy offices to embed privacy-by-design and compliance-by-design principles into research technology reference architectures and solution patterns.
• Collaborates with enterprise Cloud, AI, Data, and Security architecture leaders to ensure research technology architecture leverages enterprise platforms and avoids unnecessary duplication or technical debt.
• Serves as the primary enterprise architecture partner to research faculty, Principal Investigators, research administration, grants and sponsored programs offices, and research-facing IT leaders.
• Develops and maintains architecture governance mechanisms appropriate for research environments, including lightweight review processes, self-service decision frameworks, and exception management pathways.
• Monitors research technology and policy trends and uses scenario planning to ensure research technology architecture remains adaptable to changes in funding, regulation, and platform evolution.
• Analyzes research business processes and workflows to develop research business capability models and produces enterprise architecture artifacts including roadmaps, capability maps, reference architectures, and decision records that align technology investments with research objectives and are consumable by executive, technical, and research stakeholders.

• Bachelor of Arts or Science Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field (Required)
• And 10+ years Information Technology experience (Required)
• 5+ years as Enterprise Architect (Required)
• 5+ years Experience in academic medical center, university research, or life sciences research technology environments, with direct exposure to IRB, NIH funding, and research data governance (Required)

Penn Medicine is dedicated to our tripartite mission of providing the highest level of care to patients, conducting innovative research, and educating future leaders in the field of medicine. Working for this leading academic medical center means collaboration with top clinical, technical and business professionals across all disciplines.

Today at Penn Medicine, someone will make a breakthrough. Someone will heal a heart, deliver hopeful news, and give comfort and reassurance. Our employees shape our future each day. Are you living your life’s work?, We believe that the best care for our patients starts with the best care for our employees. Our employee benefits programs help our employees get healthy and stay healthy. We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits program that includes one of the finest prepaid tuition assistance programs in the region. Penn Medicine employees are actively engaged and committed to our mission. Together we will continue to make medical advances that help people live longer, healthier lives.