Principal System Architect

Medidata: Powering Smarter Treatments and Healthier People

Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, is leading the digital transformation of life sciences, creating hope for millions of people. Medidata helps generate the evidence and insights to help pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device and diagnostics companies, and academic researchers accelerate value, minimize risk, and optimize outcomes. More than one million registered users across 2,000+ customers and partners access the world's most trusted platform for clinical development, commercial, and real-world data. Known for its ground-breaking technological innovations, Medidata has supported more than 30,000 clinical trials and 9 million study participants. And Medidata’s ongoing commitment to infusing the patient voice into trial designs and solutions is helping to create a better and more inclusive experience for all participants in clinical studies. Medidata is involved in nearly 40% of company-initiated trial starts globally, with studies conducted in more than 140 countries. More than 70% of novel drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022 were developed with Medidata software. Medidata is headquartered in New York City and has offices around the world to meet the needs of its customers. Discover more at www.medidata.com and follow us @medidata.  

Our Team: 

You will work on Medidata's next generation of SaaS-based clinical trial management applications, deployed on AWS and you will play an important role in developing our new platform. Our philosophy here is that if you demonstrate the right team focus and proactive attitude, on the back of a solid foundation in application engineering, we will train and invest in you to develop your experience in our platform technologies.

You will join our Medidata Rave CTMS team: https://www.medidata.com/en/products/ctms. You will report to the Product Engineering manager for Rave CTMS. Our development team is located in Hammersmith, London.

The Rave CTMS platform provides efficient monitoring of clinical studies with integrated workflows. It improves the Clinical Research Associate experience, aids proactive decision-making, and reduces risk and costs, to increase study performance, patient safety, and time to market for the drug/device. Put another way, it's saving lives. This product is used by over 1,000 pharmaceutical companies, biotech, medical device firms, academic medical centres and contract research organisations around the world.

Who we're looking for:

Principal Systems Architects are focused on the strategy and implementation of multiple programs or suites of applications.  They are excellent communicators of technical information to diverse audiences both inside and outside the company.

Vision

• Has a strong vision for the future direction of the services and products in their purview as well as their overall thematic area of expertise (e.g. authentication)

• Knows overall company objectives, and how they relate to the applications in their purview.

• Influences the shaping of future products by contributing to the framework (architecture) used across multiple products or systems.

Design

• Provides designs for several thematically related frameworks, systems or products, or delegates such designs to other members of scrum team and oversees their work.

• Conceives system interfaces and business application prototypes.

• Works to ensure their applications and services follow Medidata's design principles to ensure the scalability, performance, maintainability and security of their solutions.

• Identifies, analyzes and resolves system design weaknesses.

• Reuses existing components effectively, either built within Medidata or off-the-shelf.

• Designs new systems for reuse by others in the company.

• Ensure their suite of related applications are being reused effectively across the company, and raises issues to senior leadership if this isn't the case.

• Owns the design principles and architecture associated with their application(s) and contributes feedback on overall design principles and enterprise architecture.

• Owns the program specific design principles and enterprise architecture items and contributes feedback on overall design principles and enterprise architecture.

Execution

• Contributes code and sprint deliverables for their applications and services.

• Creates and owns quality goals/non-functional requirements.

• Responds to CIRTs involving the applications in their purview.

• Ensures engineering teams understand and adhere to architectural designs and Medidata's design principles.

• Resolves quality or alignment issues within their applications or services or escalates issues of wider scope.

• Creates and owns quality goals/non-functional requirements; ensures are these are taken off the backlog and into sprints with regularity.

Communication

• Deeply understands their group of platform related business outcomes (program(s)) and frequently teaches others.

• Is an expert in and communicates (internally and externally) the business or infrastructure utility being exposed and ensures that that value is easily consumable.

• Contributes to the creation and socialization of design principles and ensures their program complies with design principles.

• Assists in portfolio planning and owns the extraction of common, reusable patterns and tech initiatives from the platform portfolio.

• Collaborates with Product and Engineering to map business processes and tech initiatives across the platform and specifically their program.

• Collaborates with engineering on software architecture design.

• Leads the creation of the models, documentation, and contracts that are aligned with enterprise architecture standards (i.e., in Arc 42).

• Holds weekly/biweekly architecture meetings with their architects(s).

• Supervises/mentors the activities of others.

• Socializes design principles within their engineering teams and across other teams in the company, especially related to their area of expertise.

• Actively teaches others in the company about their area(s) of architectural expertise.

• Leverages existing strong relationships with product owners, engineers, and engineering management to align the technical architecture and roadmap of their program with platform roadmaps.