Principal Research Data Architect

Zealand Pharma

29d • Onsite

About The Position

This is a foundational role for the data-driven future of Zealand Pharma. You will lead the team that builds, operates, and owns our research data foundation — the governed, semantically-consistent data source that turns assay results, compound data and computed properties into a platform ready for analysis, machine learning and agentic workflows. You will set the vision and lead delivery across our legacy systems and cloud data platforms, partnering with research and IT, who own the underlying tech stack and data ingestion. You will start with shared accountability alongside our data management and IT leads and grow into end-to-end ownership of the ecosystem as it matures. It is a rare mandate to shape a research data ecosystem from architecture through operation.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing research or scientific data architectures, ideally in drug discovery or life sciences
• Hands-on experience with a scientific data platform (Benchling or comparable LIMS/ELN) and with requirements engineering (URS/FRS)
• Strong grounding in semantic technologies - ontologies, controlled vocabularies, knowledge graphs and F.A.I.R. / ontology-based data management
• Experience with cloud lakehouse platforms (Databricks or equivalent) and data pipelines feeding analytics and AI/ML
• Demonstrated ownership of data governance - metadata, lineage, and reference/master data
• Proven ability to lead a team, set architecture direction, and drive delivery across vendors and cross-functional stakeholders; familiarity with peptide or biologics data is an advantage

Responsibilities

• Own the research data model - capturing scientific requirements as URS/FRS, directing configuration of new workflows with architecting new platforms working with implementation partners, and extending the model to new assay types
• Co-lead the migration of legacy assay data into the future foundation, jointly accountable with our data management and IT leads
• Build the semantic layer for Zealand Pharma - adapting public ontologies and legacy controlled vocabularies into a governed vocabulary served across research, taking an adopt-and-extend approach rather than reinventing standards
• Own research data governance - data quality, lineage, metadata and reference data - as the trustworthy foundation for every downstream use
• Architect the research data lake and tactical knowledge graphs, delivering a "Zealand research context" as a substrate for analytics and AI
• Partner with our AI/ML, computational chemistry and agentic-workflow leads as their data source supplier, and ensure governed data flows cleanly into analysis and visualization layers

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed