Hybrid Director, Architecture

at Syneos Health

• Job title: Director, Architecture
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior, Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Cloud, Google Cloud Platform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Hyderabad, India

About the role

• Director Cloud Architecture responsible for cloud architecture strategy at Syneos Health. Leading design governance and ensuring compliance across multi-cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• The Director Cloud Architecture serves as the enterprise cloud design authority, owning architecture decisions, standards, and guardrails across all cloud environments to ensure resiliency, security, and scale by design.
• This role defines cloud architecture strategy and reference architecture; establishes availability, dependency, resiliency, and disaster recovery patterns upfront; and translates architectural intent into enforceable guardrails through policy as code.
• Partnering closely with Engineering and Infrastructure, the Principal Engineer reviews and shapes platform designs, drives consistent architecture governance, and enables delivery teams to build compliant, repeatable solutions through clear standards and approved patterns.
• Own cloud architecture strategy, reference architectures, and engineering standards across Azure/AWS/GCP/OCI and hybrid environments, with strong PaaS patterns and guidance.
• Define resiliency, disaster recovery, security, availability, and dependency patterns upfront (including target SLAs/SLOs) and socialize them through clear design artifacts.
• Translate architectural intent into enforceable guardrails, including policy as code, blueprinting, and paved-road patterns that reduce variation and rework.
• Review and shape platform and product designs in partnership with Engineering and Infrastructure, ensuring alignment to standards and documented risk tradeoffs.
• Establish and run consistent architecture governance (design reviews, decision records, exception process, and lifecycle updates to standards).
• Lead dependency modeling and risk assessments for critical services, driving pragmatic recommendations that balance resiliency, cost, performance, and delivery timelines.
• Define cloud landing-zone and platform guardrails (networking, identity, encryption, logging/monitoring) and ensure they are adoptable by delivery teams.
• Influence through standards: coach teams, create reusable templates and reference implementations, and drive alignment without becoming a delivery bottleneck.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience);
• advanced degree preferred.
• Deep multi-cloud architecture experience (Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI), including strong PaaS exposure and experience designing secure, scalable platform patterns.
• Demonstrated credibility as a design authority across engineering and operations teams, with a track record of driving adoption of standards and reference architectures.
• Strong grasp of resiliency engineering, disaster recovery, availability patterns, dependency modeling, and risk tradeoffs (cost/performance/reliability).
• Hands-on experience translating architecture into enforceable guardrails (policy as code, landing zone controls, standardized pipelines/templates, and exception management).
• Strong security architecture fundamentals (identity, network segmentation, encryption, logging/monitoring) and familiarity with regulated/audit-driven environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence through standards, coach teams, and align stakeholders on architectural decisions.
• 10-12 years of experience.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.
• Comprehensive resources including emerging technologies, data, science and knowledge sharing.