Principal Enterprise Architect - AI & Agents

IQVIA•Durham, PA

About The Position

Within IQVIA’s AI & Technology Solutions (ATS) organization, the Architecture & Standards (A&S) group defines “the IQVIA way” of building technology. The Enterprise Architecture (EA) function, operating within A&S, is responsible for translating business strategy and OKRs into scalable, standards‑driven architectures that reduce technical debt, enable reuse, and transform business processes. The Enterprise Architecture organization is seeking a Principal Enterprise Architect – AI & Agentic Solutions to define, govern, and evolve enterprise architecture strategy, standards, and roadmaps across a large, global technology landscape. This role plays a critical leadership position in shaping how AI and agentic capabilities are designed, governed, and adopted across IQVIA. The ideal candidate combines strategic vision with architectural rigor. They understand how emerging AI technologies can reshape research and data operations within a CRO environment while ensuring alignment with enterprise principles, governance, and compliance requirements. This leader balances innovation with pragmatism and can translate complex AI concepts into structured capabilities, reference architectures, and reusable patterns. The role requires comfort engaging across engineering, data science, and senior business stakeholders to deliver responsible, scalable, and standards‑driven enterprise AI solutions.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in enterprise or application architecture within large, complex organizations, including ownership of standards, roadmaps, and governance.
Proven experience designing and scaling generative AI and agentic solutions, with a strong focus on reusable patterns and operationalization.
Deep technical knowledge of generative AI and agentic concepts, including vector databases, RAG, tool‑use, MCP servers, HITL, evaluation frameworks, monitoring, observability, and platforms such as LangGraph.
Strong cloud architecture experience on Azure and/or AWS, including modern data architectures (lakehouse, governance, cataloguing).
Expertise in modern integration styles (API‑first, event‑driven, microservices) and the ability to codify them into enterprise standards and reference architectures.
Exceptional communication, influence, and stakeholder management skills, including engagement with senior business, product, and technology leaders.
Experience building business cases for modernization, rationalization, and platform consolidation initiatives.

Nice To Haves

Experience in healthcare or life sciences, with strong knowledge of the clinical trial lifecycle, real‑world evidence, or commercialization of clinical assets.
Hands‑on partnership with CRO business teams, including study design, site activation and management, clinical operations, regulatory affairs, medical affairs and KOL engagement, real‑world safety and efficacy, pharmacovigilance, and EMR ecosystems.
Proficiency with enterprise architecture tools (LeanIX, Ardoq, MEGA, or similar) and formal capability modeling methodologies.

Responsibilities

Define, maintain, and evolve enterprise reference architectures, standards, and reusable patterns for generative AI and agentic systems.
Govern solution designs, including selection of appropriate technical components, ensuring delivery teams can adopt standards with minimal friction.
Provide architectural oversight for major AI initiatives, guiding trade-offs across security, compliance, scalability, cost, and time‑to‑value.
Translate business strategies and OKRs into capability‑based roadmaps and target‑state architectures, avoiding project‑specific point solutions.
Drive enterprise interoperability across systems and data domains by defining integration patterns and data exchange approaches aligned with enterprise standards.
Partner with compliance, risk, and information security teams to ensure architectures align with global regulatory and quality expectations (e.g., GxP, GDPR, HIPAA, EU AI Act).
Maintain enterprise capability models and architecture artifacts using EA tools (e.g., LeanIX, Ardoq, MEGA), mapping capabilities to processes, systems, products, outcomes, and key data domains.
Identify opportunities to consolidate platforms and services across business units, quantifying investment implications and business benefits.
Guide senior stakeholders through architectural options, trade-offs, and investment decisions using clear, business-focused narratives and models.
Monitor AI, agentic, and life sciences technology trends; assess relevance and fit; and inform enterprise roadmaps, reference architectures, and innovation priorities.
Mentor and influence architects and senior engineers to raise overall architecture maturity and adherence to enterprise standards.