Head of Platform Architecture

The businesses of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany•Billerica, MA

8d•$195,800 - $293,800•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a senior, hands-on platform architect to own the technical foundation for commercial, enterprise-grade data products and digital platforms. Together with your team, you will translate complex customer and business needs into secure, resilient and maintainable architectures, while staying close enough to implementation to remain credible with principal and staff engineers. You will define reusable capabilities that help teams move from prototype to customer-ready product without compromising product ownership or customer value.

Requirements

Platform architecture depth: significant experience designing and building sophisticated software, cloud, data or AI platforms and customer-facing digital products at enterprise scale, with the ability to translate customer problems into architectures and executable roadmaps.
Multi-tenant and deployment architecture: experience designing secure multi-tenant platforms and multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud or customer-managed deployment models.
Security and compliance: substantial hands-on experience owning secure architecture decisions in production, with working knowledge of relevant frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2, NIST, GDPR and, where relevant, HIPAA or GxP/GAMP 5.

Nice To Haves

Building platforms that connect sensitive data, including healthcare or clinical data, across organizational, business or legal boundaries.
Palantir Foundry or comparable enterprise data platforms, including data products, ontology, governance and lineage.
Experience building commercial software products, partner ecosystems, customer-managed deployments or cyber-physical and digital-twin solutions.
Cloud-native architecture: demonstrated depth on at least one major provider, including containers, serverless, networking, IAM and observability.
Data-platform architecture: experience with ingestion, transformation, storage, analytics, lineage, access controls, tenant-aware governance and data quality.
Technical leadership: credibility to challenge senior engineers, communicate across technical and commercial audiences, and lead collaboratively as a player-coach.

Responsibilities

Own the platform architecture
Define and communicate the target architecture for commercial, cloud-native data platforms and digital products across a portfolio of products and deployment models, translating ambiguous customer and business needs into technical strategy, platform capabilities and delivery roadmaps.
Establish architectural principles, standards and decision frameworks covering reuse, security, scalability and supportability.
Design data and AI platforms across heterogeneous sources, including ingestion, transformation, storage, analytics, provenance, lineage, quality, access control and secure multi-tenancy.
Design appropriate SaaS, multi-cloud, hybrid and customer-managed deployment strategies, balancing security, data residency, resilience, cost and portability.
Design APIs, integration patterns, identity and authentication services, event-driven and distributed components.
Make build-versus-buy-versus-partner decisions across platforms such as Palantir Foundry, cloud services, managed SaaS and open source.
Architect for security and compliance
Apply security-by-design and defense-in-depth, including threat modeling, identity, least privilege, encryption, secure software delivery and vulnerability management.
Design platforms that are certifiable and audit-ready, partnering with security, privacy, quality, legal and audit functions on controls, evidence and customer assessments.
Translate relevant security, privacy and regulated-industry frameworks, such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST, GDPR and GxP, into concrete architectural controls.
Shape secure multi-party data ecosystems that preserve data ownership, provenance, permissions, isolation and control over data use.
Stay technically close to implementation
Review designs, prototypes and critical code paths to surface architectural and operational risk early.
Establish practices for infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, testing, release management, observability and production debugging.
Help teams industrialize prototypes and MVPs and resolve difficult problems across application, infrastructure, data and security boundaries, choosing technologies according to the problem rather than habit.
Lead and communicate
Provide technical direction and mentorship across levels, including senior and principal engineers, and raise the technical bar without becoming a bottleneck.
Support hiring, team design and capability development in partnership with engineering leadership.
Explain architectural decisions, limitations, costs and trade-offs clearly to engineers, product leaders, customers, partners, auditors and executives.