Principal Architect — Governance & Performance

About the team

AstraZeneca’s Enterprise Architecture team shapes the digital backbone that powers discovery, development, manufacturing, and delivery of life-changing medicines. We partner with senior leaders across R&D, Operations, Commercial, and Enabling Functions to translate strategy into scalable platforms, data and integration capabilities, and secure, modern architectures. We champion simplification, interoperability, and measurable business outcomes across a complex, global landscape.
 

About the role

As a Principal Architect focused on Governance & Performance at AstraZeneca, you will own the consistent implementation of strategic architecture decisions across business and IT, ensuring alignment with AZ’s strategy and compliance with our standards, blueprints, and roadmaps. Partnering with senior business and IT leaders, you will translate enterprise strategy and portfolios into a clear architectural direction across AZ’s architecture assets: Business, Application, Information/Data, and Infrastructure. You will be accountable for the health and effectiveness of key architecture processes—particularly standards management, lifecycle management, and architecture governance—and will drive continuous improvement in Enterprise Architecture (EA) performance. You will proactively incorporate industry trends (e.g., microservices, APIs, data platforms/Big Data) into AZ imperatives and guidelines, educate stakeholders, and serve as a sponsor or steering group member for cross-functional, enterprise-wide initiatives. This role operates with a global remit and acts as a strategic advisor to senior leadership.
 

What you’ll do

• Enterprise design leadership: Provide enterprise design thinking and support across one or more focused domains (Business, Data/Information, Application, Infrastructure).
• Governance and standards: Define, refine, and govern architecture strategy, direction, standards, and performance measures for your segment; ensure compliance with AZ standards and global strategies.
• Business alignment: Translate business priorities and strategies into enterprise architecture requirements; ensure capabilities continuously align to current business objectives.
• Roadmaps and blueprints: Lead development of multi-year (1–5 year) architecture roadmaps and blueprints; act as sign-off authority for solution and segment architectures and enterprise blueprints.
• Process excellence: Lead implementation of EA standards, processes, and tooling; establish and run information architecture design authority for efficient, effective decision-making.
• Performance management: Define and track EA performance metrics, drive lifecycle and standards adherence, and lead continuous improvement across EA practices.
• Thought leadership: Provide advanced technical and architectural thought leadership across IS; champion EA initiatives and best-practice sharing to mature the architecture capability.
• External engagement: Build networks with external SMEs, analyze market and technology trends, establish partnerships with key suppliers, and assess enterprise impact.
• Cross-functional influence: Contribute to decision-making bodies; influence senior stakeholders in business and IT to adopt change and innovative solutions.
• People leadership: Lead and develop teams (direct and matrix, across locations), typically managing 0–10 people indirectly; foster cross-cultural collaboration.

Required skills and qualifications

• Education: Relevant technical degree or equivalent experience.
• EA leadership: Proven experience defining and aligning architectural roadmaps and strategies to business strategy across Business, Application, Data/Information, and Infrastructure domains.
• Governance and lifecycle: Hands-on experience setting EA standards, lifecycle management, and governance frameworks, including compliance and performance measurement.
• Formal frameworks and consolidation: Experience with rationalization, consolidation, and integration across business domains using a formal EA framework.
• Business case and evaluation: Experience leading large justification phases, including product evaluation and business case formulation.
• Stakeholder influence: Ability to influence senior business and IT stakeholders to drive change and adoption of innovative solutions.
• EA capability building: Experience defining and developing components of an Enterprise Architecture practice.
• Supplier management: Experience managing and negotiating with third-party suppliers and establishing strategic partnerships.
• Team leadership: Experi