Principal Data Platform Architect - Evinova

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Employment Type: Full time

Join Evinova as a Principal Data Platform Architect in our Data Platform team, leading the architecture of a modern cloud-native data platform. Shape end‑to‑end systems that are secure, scalable and AI‑ready, powering next‑generation digital products for clinical trials and patient outcomes.

Evinova is a new health tech business with a mission to transform billions of patients’ lives through technology, data and cutting-edge ways of working in the Life Sciences industry. Evinova provides a software platform and software application suite that focuses on science to support clinical trials by enabling effective data analytics and efficient planning, execution and oversight of all trials in a sponsor portfolio.  

Evinova delivers market-leading digital health solutions that are science-based, evidence-led and human experience-driven. Smart risks and quick decisions come together to accelerate innovation across the life sciences sector. Be part of a diverse team that pushes the boundaries of science by digitally empowering a deeper understanding of the patients we are helping. Launch game-changing digital solutions that improve the patient's experience, optimize clinical trial execution and deliver better health outcomes. 

About the role:

We are creating a dynamic and innovative team to take our organization to the forefront of technology solutions for the life sciences industry. Our cloud platform will play a crucial part in the success of Evinova as the foundation for our current and future digital products.

You will be a senior technical authority responsible for the overall architecture and integrity of our cloud-native data platform and its ecosystem. You will operate at system and platform level, ensuring that individual components, services and data flows come together as a secure, reliable, cost‑effective and future‑proof whole.

• Own and evolve the system architecture for features and products within the Data Platform crew, ensuring designs are cohesive across applications, integration layers, infrastructure and data.

• Define, promote and govern standard patterns, reference architectures and reusable components that ensure consistency, reliability and security across data products and platform services.

• Maximize the effective use of AWS services and native data capabilities to deliver performant, cost‑optimized and maintainable systems, including multi‑account, multi‑region and high‑availability designs.

• Identify, surface and mitigate architectural risks early, making clear trade‑offs and providing recommendations to product and engineering stakeholders and senior leadership.

• Define clear boundaries and integration contracts between systems, domains and microservices, enabling modular, event-driven and API‑first architectures with strong encapsulation.

• Partner closely with Team leadership, Data Engineers, Platform Engineers, and product to advance and support team‑level CI/CD practices, infrastructure‑as‑code, automated testing and observability for data and platform workloads.

• Contribute to and oversee the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines for data and analytics services, ensuring alignment with platform infrastructure standards, security policies, compliance principles and operational SLAs.

• Provide hands-on engineering direction and technical mentorship, performing architectural and code reviews to uphold high standards of scalability, resilience, performance and maintainability.

• Champion best‑in‑class data engineering and system design principles, including modern data modeling, orchestration, observability, data quality controls, lineage, fault tolerance and graceful degradation.

• Oversee the creation and maintenance of high‑quality technical documentation, architectural decision records, system diagrams and runbooks, and support knowledge sharing and training for engineers consuming platform capabilities.

• Act as a key communication channel between the Data Platform crew and other product, platform and enterprise architecture teams, ensuring alignment on platform strategy, roadmaps, integration approaches and data contracts.

• Shape and influence technology roadmaps, target architectures and investment decisions for the data platform, contributing to long‑term platform strategy and capability evolution.

• Evaluate and guide adoption of new technologies, tools and patterns in cloud, data, integration and observability, ensuring they add clear value and fit within the overall system architecture. 

Required Skills:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Extensive experience in software engineering or data engineering roles, including significant experience as a System Architect, Solutions Architect, Data Architect or equivalent senior technical leadership role.

• Deep expertise in public cloud platforms, with a strong focus on AWS (e.g., EC2, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Glue, EMR, MSK/Kinesis, API Gateway, IAM, Secrets Manager), including design of multi‑tier and distributed systems.

• Proven track record designing end‑to‑end system architectures for complex, mission‑critical workloads, including high availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning and performance optimization.

• Strong understanding of security and compliance, including SSL/TLS, network security (VPC, firewalls, security groups), identity and access management, encryption, key management and security by design principles.

• Experience working in regulated environments or with standards such as HIPAA, GxP, FISMA or similar, and designing architectures that enable compliance, auditability and traceability.

• Proficiency in modern programming languages such as Java, Python or Node.js, and in designing and integrating SOAP/RESTful APIs and event‑based interfaces.

• Strong data architecture skills, including experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, data lakes and streaming/event‑driven data solutions.

• Hands‑on experience with event‑driven architectures (e.g., Kafka/MSK, Kinesis, SNS/SQS) and designing asynchronous, resilient integration patterns.

• Solid grounding in data modeling (conceptual, logical and physical), including modeling for analytics, operational data stores and domain‑driven design.

• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK), automated testing and modern DevOps/SRE practices.

• Experience designing for observability and operability, including logging, metrics, tracing, alerting and runbook‑driven operations.

• Ability to translate business and product requirements into clear architectural options and recommendations, including cost, performance, risk and operational trade‑offs.

• Strong communication and influencing skills, with experience engaging senior stakeholders and facilitating architectural decision‑making across teams. 

• Experience setting or contributing to enterprise or domain architecture standards and governance, including architecture review processes and guardrails.

• Proven ability to shape and drive multi‑year technology roadmaps at platform or portfolio level.

• Financial and commercial acumen in technology decisions (e.g., cloud cost optimization, build‑vs‑buy decisions, vendor evaluation).

• Experience leading cross‑team architectural initiatives, migrations or modernization programs (e.g., legacy-to-cloud, monolith-to-microservices, data platform re‑platforming).

• Strong risk management capability, including identification of systemic risks, mitigation plans and communication of residual risks to leadership. 

Soft skills:

• Strong business acumen, with the ability to connect system‑level technical decisions to business outcomes, cost optimization and ROI.

• Strategic thinker, able to balance long‑term architectural vision with pragmatic, incremental delivery and technical debt management.

• Clear and confident communicator, able to explain complex technical concepts and system designs to non‑technical stakeholders and senior leaders.

• Collaborative mindset, building trusted partnerships across engineering, product, security, compliance, enterprise architecture and business teams.

• Comfortable operating at scale and ambiguity, with the ability to simplify complexity and set clear direction for multiple teams.

• Structured decision‑maker, using defined patterns and frameworks to evaluate architectural options and trade‑offs, and documenting decisions transparently.

• Passion for mentoring and developing others, creating an environment of continual learning, technical excellence and healthy challenge.

• Curiosity and continuous learning mindset, staying abreast of emerging technologies and practices in cloud, data, integration, security and AI.

• Ownership mentality with a strong focus on quality, reliability, resilience and user experience for the systems you design.

Desired Skills:

• Experience designing and delivering data platforms and services in the life sciences, healthcare or other highly regulated industries.

• Familiarity with the Drug Development process and associated GxP principles, and how these influence data, security and audit requirements.

• Experience with modern data platform concepts such as data mesh, data products, domain‑oriented ownership and self‑service data infrastructure.

• Knowledge of analytics, ML/AI enablement and MLOps patterns, and how to architect data platforms that support advanced analytics and model lifecycle management.

• Exposure to clinical trial data standards (e.g., CDISC) or healthcare data standards (e.g., HL7/FHIR).

• Familiarity with observability tooling and practices (logging, metrics, tracing) for data platforms and distributed systems.

• Experience working in agile, product‑centric organizations, ideally in a crew/tribe or similar model at scale.

• Professional certifications in AWS, Azure or relevant architecture disciplines (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, TOGAF or similar). 

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

Are you ready to make a difference? Apply now and join us in our mission to change lives!

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.