Chief Architect (SVP)

Our Industry: Where we play

Medidata is making a real difference in the lives of patients everywhere by accelerating critical drug and medical device development, enabling life-saving drugs and medical devices to get to market faster. Our products sit at the convergence of the Technology and Life Sciences industries, one of most exciting areas for global innovation.

We invented the Medidata Clinical Cloud® which is the primary technology solution powering clinical trials for over 90% of the world’s top global pharmaceutical and medical-device companies – from study design and planning through execution, management and reporting. We are publicly traded (MDSO), have 850 customers with retention rates at 100% and a revenue run-rate of over $500M in 2017. Our customers include global pharmaceutical companies, biotech, diagnostic and device firms, leading academic medical centers, technical partners and contract research organizations.

Medidata’s solutions have powered over 13,000 clinical trials to date giving us the largest collection of clinical trial data in the world. With this asset, we pioneer innovative, advanced applications and intelligent data analytics, bringing an unmatched level of quality and efficiency to clinical trials enabling treatments to reach waiting patients sooner.

We know that diverse teams win and therefore we are committed to selecting leaders and employees that represent the markets in which we operate. We are still led by our Co-founders, Tarek Sherif and Glen de Vries, and have global operations in US, Europe and Asia with over 1600 employees.

Medidata is looking for an outstanding executive with exceptional business acumen and technical expertise to head our Global Architecture organization as the Chief Architect!

Our Chief Architect will have the unique opportunity to define and deliver the future state of Medidata’s platform and enterprise architecture. We embrace modern design principles, practices and technologies. We are searching for a leader who can drive positive change across a complex array of solutions, technology stacks and designs to enable even faster innovation that brings value to our customers.

Opportunities like this are a rarity, don’t miss out!

Your Commitments:

Responsible for the Architecture Vision and Technology Roadmap that aligns to Medidata’s strategy and business objectives.
Drive development and execution of enterprise architecture programs and initiatives
Define architecture standards and governance/review processes needed to support use of standards across Medidata’s Technology organization.
Advocate within the organization, from line level to C-level, to ensure architectural priorities are known and executed within the broader business context
The Chief Architect will be responsible for both Enterprise Architecture and Data Architecture
Contribute to business strategy as an expert on technology tools and trends
Help create and ensure compliance with standards, security, best practices, and designs throughout the organization
Develop and support strong cross functional partnerships with Product, Engineering, Testing and Security & Compliance
Take ownership of architectural decisions beyond the design phase – into execution and rollout to ensure they are providing the expected customer value
Facilitate design reviews of our products and services to ensure they are operable, scalable, meet latency requirements, meet availability requirements, are comparatively low cost, easy to maintain and well monitored

Your Competencies:

This role is a SVP in our organization, any applicant must possess the executive leadership level experience and background necessary to be eligible.
Responsible for our system architecture models, views, and documentation (conceptual models, logical models, service catalogs, technical inventories, data models etc.)
Support business and product leaders to align Medidata product strategy with technologies and future solutions.
Candidate should have experience with: big data architecture, developing data pipelines and data systems and tools. Should also have experience with data access, cleaning, storage, and management.
Evaluate and select new and emerging technologies based on business need and fit within the architecture vision and strategy.
Be proactively involved in the wider engineering/architecture community, identifying/implementing industry best practices.
Drive change across the organization – influence leadership both within the Product Infrastructure team as well as engineering and development teams
apabile of communicating and evangilizing the architectural direction and vision to stakeholders.
Work with Engineering and Service Delivery to ensure system architectures are robust, scalable and secure, with appropriate overall system design and integration points/APIs, to deliver a high quality customer experience.
Collaborate in building a culture of continuous delivery and improvement, ensuring that key systems are regularly analyzed, maintained and improved.
Provide clear, consistent leadership, management and mentoring for direct reports and the broader technology organization
Take responsibility for recruitment, training and develop technical skills of enterprise and data architects.
Ability to apply both technical competence and interpersonal skills to achieve business outcomes
High emotional intelligence, sound temperament and professional attitude
Extensive experience in delivering services using SaaS and PaaS in a hybrid cloud environment
Strong financial acumen to understand the cost and value tradeoffs of various technology decisions
Lead, coach, and mentor a team of outstanding senior enterprise and data architects and leaders.

Your Education & Experience:

M.S. degree in Computer Science or B.S. degree with significant relevant experience
15+ years of experience building and leading a growing enterprise architecture function for cloud products.
Deep understanding of the fundamentals required to build highly available and scalable services, including the benefits and trade-offs between asynchronous and synchronous processing, various methods for sharding and segmenting services, and how to anticipate and prevent scaling bottlenecks.
Experience designing, rolling out and iteratively improving enterprise architecture across a large number of tightly and loosely-coupled distinct products, including successful integration of core platform capabilities that are leveraged across the entire product suite.
A lot of bonus points: Experience in life sciences industry and/or medical/clinical operations.

Our Culture: Who we are

We know that creativity doesn’t happen on-demand. Developing cutting-edge cloud technology takes great minds and talented people working together in a collaborative environment. That is why we are committed to fostering an innovative, agile company culture. We encourage our teams to come together and experiment with new concepts, research new approaches and test out new technologies. We believe that being part of our team will make a difference in the world.

Our Mission: Powering smarter treatments and healthier people.
Our Vision: To be the most innovative cloud company in Life Sciences.
Our Principles: Integrity, Partnership, Inventiveness, Humility, Nimbleness, Tenacity, Inclusiveness, and Caring.
Our Leadership Drivers:

THINK: Inspires purpose, articulates strategy, and simplifies complexity
TEAM: Communicates effectively, builds relationships and collaborates with others
DO: Plans ahead, scales for growth, ensures accountability
LEARN: Self-aware, values difference, strives to learn
TEACH: Inspires work, coaches others, builds teams

EEO Statement

US:

Medidata Solutions, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Medidata Solutions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the law. Medidata Solutions complies with applicable state and local laws governing non-discrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities.