Data Security Architect (Remote)

The Data Security Architect role presents a foundational opportunity to establish and lead IQVIA’s Data Security Architecture practice. As a data-driven global life sciences company, IQVIA manages one of the world’s most complex and sensitive healthcare data estates — spanning clinical research, real-world evidence, commercial analytics, and patient-level health information across dozens of markets worldwide.

IQVIA’s data environment reflects the scale and complexity of a global enterprise with a significant M&A history: a hybrid estate encompassing on-premises data centers, multi-cloud infrastructure, modern analytical platforms, and a broad portfolio of operational and data movement technologies. Sensitive data — including PHI, PII, pharmaceutical client intellectual property, and clinical trial data — is distributed across this estate and must be protected consistently, at scale, and in alignment with a growing set of global regulatory requirements.

The Data Security Architect will define how IQVIA discovers, classifies, governs, and protects its data assets across the enterprise — building the architecture, standards, and program foundations that underpin regulatory compliance, vendor governance, and AI security as IQVIA advances its data platform strategy.

This role sits within the global Information Security organization and operates in close partnership with the Data Office, Cloud Security, Application Security, IAM, Legal, Privacy, and Compliance. It carries direct engagement with senior data platform and business stakeholders across IQVIA’s global business units.

Principal Responsibilities

• Define and own IQVIA’s Data Security Architecture strategy, establishing a formal program from the ground up that is aligned to IQVIA’s hybrid, multi-cloud, and post-M&A data environment and the Data Office’s strategic platform direction.
• Lead the evaluation, selection, and implementation of a Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) platform, encompassing sensitive data discovery, classification, exposure analysis, access risk assessment, and continuous posture monitoring across on-premises and cloud-hosted data environments.
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive data security architecture covering data classification frameworks, data access governance, encryption standards, tokenization, masking, and data loss prevention controls across structured and unstructured data at scale.
• Partner closely with the Data Office to align data security architecture with enterprise data governance and platform strategy, ensuring security controls are embedded in data lifecycle management across analytical, operational, and AI workloads.
• Define security architecture standards and guardrails for IQVIA’s strategic data platforms, including cloud-native analytical environments (Snowflake, Databricks), data movement and transformation tooling, and operational database platforms, ensuring consistent security posture across a diverse and evolving estate.
• Provide data security architecture input and oversight for platform migrations, legacy system decommissions, and M&A integration programs — assessing inherited data estates for sensitive data exposure, access control gaps, and regulatory risk, and defining remediation roadmaps aligned to integration timelines.
• Define IQVIA’s data security approach for AI and LLM-integrated platforms, establishing policy and technical controls governing the safe use of AI capabilities embedded in or connected to data platforms, including controls around data inputs, model outputs, and prevention of regulated data exposure in AI workflows.
• Architect data security controls for advanced analytics and AI/ML pipelines, including protection of training datasets, model pipeline integrity, RAG data source governance, and controls preventing unauthorized use of sensitive data in AI-connected systems.
• Develop and govern IQVIA’s enterprise data classification taxonomy and policy framework, working with Legal, Privacy, Compliance, and business data owners to define classification tiers, handling requirements, and technical enforcement mechanisms across business units and regions.
• Establish data access governance principles across IQVIA’s data platforms, including least-privilege access models, periodic entitlement reviews, and integration with IAM and PAM controls at the data tier.
• Define encryption and key management architecture for data at rest and in transit across on-premises databases, cloud storage, data warehouses, and analytical environments, with particular attention to PHI and cross-border data transfer requirements.
• Provide security architecture input to data platform vendor evaluations and contract negotiations, ensuring security requirements, data-use restrictions, telemetry controls, and audit rights are appropriately re