Executive Director, Head of Enterprise Platforms(must have Data platform ownership exp) Full Time NEW

Syneos Health® is a leading fully-integrated life sciences services organization built to accelerate customer success. We partner with innovators at every point across the drug development and commercialization continuum, helping them navigate complexity, anticipate change and accelerate progress.

Every day we perform better because of how we work together, as one team, each the best at what we do. We bring together talented experts across a broad spectrum of business critical corporate functions. Every role plays an essential part in enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our teams are agile, collaborative, and committed to delivering—for each other, for our customers, and ultimately for the people who rely on the services we support.

Discover what your 25,000 future colleagues already know:

Why Syneos Health

• We are passionate about developing our people, through career development and progression; supportive and engaged line management; technical and therapeutic area training; peer recognition and total rewards program.

• We are committed to building an inclusive culture – where you can authentically be yourself. Central to this is our purpose – Driven to Deliver – which captures the passion of our colleagues to show up each day and shape solutions that have the ability to dramatically impact someone’s life.

• We are continuously building the company we all want to work for and our customers want to work with. Why? Because we know that when we bring together smart colleagues from across the world, we can shape the future of healthcare, driving impact for customers and defining the pace of patient progress.

Job Responsibilities

This is a hands-on strategic leadership role that combines multi-year data platform vision with day-to-day operational accountability, leading a platform architecture, engineering and operations teams in addition to software engineering tools/platform organization across multiple capability areas.

Scope of Responsibility

The Executive Director oversees five interconnected platform capability areas:

• Platform Foundations & SRE: Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD automation, observability, and site reliability engineering.
• Data & Integration: Enterprise data platform architecture, ingestion pipelines, data transformation, and API/integration services.
• Security, Compliance & Testing: Security guardrails, compliance automation, quality engineering, and test automation frameworks.
• AI/ML & Knowledge: Agentic AI platform strategy, ML infrastructure, and knowledge management services.
• Enablement: Developer portal, self-service tooling, documentation, and engineering productivity.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Platform Leadership

• Own the enterprise data platform strategy, architecture, and multi-year roadmap, including lakehouse and medallion architecture patterns on Databricks.
• Establish scalable data ingestion, transformation, storage, and access patterns supporting complex clinical and commercial data workloads.
• Drive improvements in data governance, lineage, quality, and compliance frameworks with emphasis on Unity Catalog and data mesh principles.
• Partner with business, analytics, and data science stakeholders to ensure data platform capabilities align with enterprise needs and reduce time-to-insight.
• Lead data platform modernization efforts to reduce technical debt, consolidate fragmented data stores, and improve performance and cost efficiency.
• Own software engineering platforms and tools and drive standardization, which can be leveraged by larger Syneos Health Technology Solutions teams to drive automation and productivity
• Partner with Software engineering teams and CoEs to enable latest software engineering tools in alignment with organizational strategy

Platform Engineering & DevSecOps

• Lead enterprise platform engineering capabilities including CI/CD pipeline standardization, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/Bicep), security guardrails, and automation frameworks.
• Advance DevSecOps maturity to improve delivery velocity, security posture, and developer productivity across the organization.
• Drive API management strategy, developer portal development, and self-service platform capabilities that accelerate application team delivery.
• Establish and evolve the enterprise observability platform, including centralized monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing.
• Ensure platform reliability, scalability, and operational resilience across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

AI/ML Platform & Innovation

• Lead the strategy and delivery of an enterprise Agentic AI Platform to consolidate fragmented AI initiatives and provide shared AI/ML infrastructure.
• Adopt responsible AI governance, including model lifecycle management, security, and compliance guardrails.
• Partner with business and technology teams to identify and prioritize AI/ML use cases with measurable business impact.

Operational Excellence & Reliability

• Establish and monitor SLAs, SLOs, and KPIs for all platform and data services, driving continuous improvement.
• Own incident management, root cause analysis, and remediation planning for platform services.
• Drive cost optimization across cloud infrastructure and platform tooling spend.
• Manage vendor relationships, third-party technology partnerships, and contract negotiations for platform-related services.

Organizational & Talent Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop engineering managers, architects, and technical leads across enterprise platform organization.
• Build high-performing, collaborative teams organized in pod-based structures aligned to platform capability areas.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, accountability, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive strategic workforce planning, including build vs. buy vs. partner decisions and sustained allocation models.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture and Cloud leadership to ensure alignment with enterprise standards and long-term technology strategy.

Required Qualifications

• 16+ years of progressive experience in engineering, data platform, or infrastructure leadership roles, with at least 5 years in senior leadership.
• Proven track record leading enterprise-scale data platforms and cloud-native architectures (Azure & Databricks preferred).
• Strong expertise in DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipeline design, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Bicep, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated success driving large-scale platform modernization and organizational transformation initiatives.
• Experience leading distributed, cross-functional engineering teams of 50+ engineers.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence across technology and business functions at the VP and C-suite level.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; advanced degree preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Databricks, lakehouse architecture, and medallion data patterns in production environments at scale.
• Background in healthcare, life sciences, or clinical research organizations (CRO) with familiarity in GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, and CDISC data standards.
• Experience designing and deploying enterprise AI/ML platforms, including agentic AI and LLM-based solutions.
• Hands-on experience with API management platforms (e.g., Azure API Management, Kong, MuleSoft).
• Experience with enterprise observability tools (Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana, or equivalent).
• Track record of managing multi-million-dollar technology budgets and vendor portfolios.

Get to know Syneos Health

Over the past 5 years, we have worked with 94% of all Novel FDA Approved Drugs, 95% of EMA Authorized Products and over 200 Studies across 73,000 Sites and 675,000+ Trial patients.

No matter what your role is, you’ll take the initiative and challenge the status quo with us in a highly competitive and ever-changing environment. Learn more about Syneos Health.

http://www.syneoshealth.com

Additional Information

Tasks, duties, and responsibilities as listed in this job description are not exhaustive. The Company, at its sole discretion and with no prior notice, may assign other tasks, duties, and job responsibilities. Equivalent experience, skills, and/or education will also be considered so qualifications of incumbents may differ from those listed in the Job Description. The Company, at its sole discretion, will determine what constitutes as equivalent to the qualifications described above. Further, nothing contained herein should be construed to create an employment contract. Occasionally, required skills/experiences for jobs are expressed in brief terms. Any language contained herein is intended to fully comply with all obligations imposed by the legislation of each country in which it operates, including the implementation of the EU Equality Directive, in relation to the recruitment and employment of its employees. The Company is committed to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including the provision of reasonable accommodations, when appropriate, to assist employees or applicants to perform the essential functions of the job.