Principal Systems Architect
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- New York, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Architecture
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree with 15+ years of experience, Master's degree with 12+ years, or PhD with 8+ years in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Progressive software engineering background, including significant tenure at a Principal/Architect level shaping platform strategy.
- Expert-level proficiency in Java and Python, alongside broad multi-language proficiency.
- Proven history of designing resilient, high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines operating at scale.
- Hands-on mastery of cloud platforms (Kubernetes, serverless, Terraform/IaC) and modern data tooling.
- Direct experience operationalizing enterprise AI/LLM product capabilities, agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks.
- Excellent communication and influencing skills—capable of translating architectural trade-offs for engineers, executive leadership, and compliance bodies.
- Exercises wide latitude in high-ambiguity environments to establish technical direction and solve critical enterprise challenges.
Nice to have
- Substantial exposure to the life sciences sector, specifically regarding clinical trial platforms (EDC, CTMS, eTMF) or similar high-compliance GxP software environments.
- Advanced AWS credentials or a demonstrated history of architecting sophisticated, large-scale solutions on the AWS cloud platform.
Full description
Location: Hybrid- New York or Metropark
Medidata follows a hybrid office policy in which employees who are hired for an in-person position are expected to work on site a certain number of days per week following Company policy.About our Company:
Medidata is powering smarter treatments and healthier people through digital solutions to support clinical trials. Celebrating over 25 years of ground-breaking technological innovation across more than 38,000 trials and 12 million patients, Medidata offers industry-leading expertise, analytics-powered insights, and one of the largest clinical trial data sets in the industry. More than 1 million registered users across approximately 2,300 customers trust Medidata's seamless, end-to-end platform to improve patient experiences, accelerate clinical breakthroughs, and bring therapies to market faster. A Dassault Systèmes brand (Euronext Paris: FR0014003TT8, DSY.PA), Medidata is headquartered in New York City and has been recognized as a Leader by Everest Group and IDC. Discover more at . Listen to our latest podcast, from Dreamers to Disruptors, and follow us at @Medidata.
About the Team:
We are seeking a Principal Systems Architect to drive the end-to-end technical architecture across a multi-product, cloud-native SaaS platform undergoing enterprise modernization and AI enablement. Operating as an industry expert and key technical authority, you will navigate high ambiguity to establish multi-year architectural strategies, define target-state architecture, and build reference implementations adopted across the entire engineering organization.
This is a hands-on, senior individual contributor role for an organizational force multiplier — a "10x" engineer who demonstrates the power of one. You will align cross-functional priorities, solve critical enterprise challenges, and work shoulder-to-shoulder with teams from whiteboard to production, raising the standard of engineering excellence company-wide.
Responsibilities:
- Define end-to-end, outcome-based solutions across product lines and engineering domains — ensuring multi-system interoperability, alignment to enterprise architecture standards, and capability reuse.
- Author architectural blueprints and decision records; partner with Product Management to evaluate emerging technologies and translate business strategy into multi-year technical roadmaps.
- Design multi-tenant, event-driven, microservices systems at scale — messaging architectures, data partitioning strategies, and web APIs (REST, GraphQL) — setting enterprise standards for application security.
- Stay hands-on: build proofs of concept and reference implementations, review critical pull requests, and set engineering standards through working code — not just documents.
- Own AWS cloud architecture across container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS) and serverless (Lambda), standardizing the deployment lifecycle through Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).