Associate Director - Data & Platform Architecture

Associate Director - Data & Platform Architecture

Job Description Summary

Lead cross-domain Data & Platform architecture and semantic architecture to establish consistent, trusted, reusable, and machine-interpretable data across the enterprise. The role defines how business concepts, data entities, relationships, metrics, and policies are represented and connected across domains, platforms, data products, and analytical solutions.
Partner with Enterprise Data Owners, Business Domains, Enterprise Architecture, Data Governance, Platform Engineering, Analytics, and AI teams to translate business needs into conceptual and logical data models, enterprise information models, ontologies, semantic models, knowledge graph patterns, and governed consumption designs.
Provide architecture leadership for the Enterprise Semantic Layer, ensuring that business meaning and context are linked to physical data, metadata, lineage, quality, access policies, and reusable metrics. Enable trusted analytics, GenAI, Agentic AI, knowledge discovery, and cross-domain interoperability while maintaining security, privacy, compliance, and architectural standards.

Job Description

Major Accountabilities 

• Define and govern enterprise-wide data, platform, and semantic architecture standards, principles, reference models, and roadmaps aligned to business strategy and target-state architecture.
• Lead the design and maintenance of enterprise information models, conceptual and logical data models, canonical entities, and cross-domain data relationships to ensure consistency and interoperability.
• Establish and evolve the Enterprise Semantic Layer through semantic models, ontologies, taxonomies, knowledge graphs, governed metrics, and reusable business definitions.
• Design AI-ready data and knowledge architectures that enable GenAI, Agentic AI, advanced analytics, RAG, and knowledge-driven decision-making through trusted and governed data assets.
• Drive data modeling, metadata management, data product enablement, and traceability across business concepts, semantic definitions, physical data assets, and consuming solutions.
• Embed governance, quality, security, privacy, regulatory, and compliance requirements into architecture designs and conduct architecture reviews and risk assessments.
• Provide strategic architecture advisory to programs, products, and domain teams, ensuring solutions align with enterprise standards, reusable patterns, and long-term architectural objectives.
• Foster stakeholder engagement, cross-functional collaboration, innovation, and adoption of enterprise data and semantic standards while continuously improving architecture practices and capabilities.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline; advanced degree or relevant certifications preferred.
• Approximately 12+ years of experience in Data & Platform Architecture, Information Architecture, Data Management, Analytics, Data Modeling, or Enterprise Architecture within large global organizations.
• Strong expertise in conceptual and logical data modeling, enterprise information architecture, metadata management, data governance, data quality, and data integration.
• Proven experience designing enterprise semantic models, ontologies, taxonomies, knowledge graphs, governed metrics, and semantic interoperability frameworks.
• Deep understanding of AI-ready data architecture, data products, data contracts, metadata, lineage, and advanced analytics enablement.
• Working knowledge of architecture and data management frameworks such as TOGAF, DAMA-DMBOK, DCAM, Data Mesh, and modern data governance practices.
• Experience with enterprise data and metadata platforms such as Collibra, Ataccama, Reltio, Immuta, Erwin, Databricks, Snowflake, Neo4j, Neptune, or similar technologies.
• Excellent stakeholder management, facilitation, communication, influencing, and leadership skills with the ability to operate effectively in a global matrix environment.

Why Novartis?

Our purpose is to reimagine medicine to improve and extend people’s lives and our vision is to become the most valued and trusted medicines company in the world. How can we achieve this? With our people. It is our associates that drive us each day to reach our ambitions. Be a part of this mission and join us!
Learn more here:

https://www.novartis.com/about/strategy/people-and-culture

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion:
Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams' representative of the patients and communities we serve.
Join our Novartis Network: If this role is not suitable to your experience or career goals but you wish to stay connected to hear more about Novartis and our career opportunities, join the Novartis Network here:
https://talentnetwork.novartis.com/network

Skills Desired

Platform Architecture

Experience Level

Mid Level