Lead Research Data Architect for AI-Driven Drug Discovery

Zealand Pharma; Søborg; On-site; DKK 1,200,000 - 1,700,000; Full time

Job summary

Zealand Pharma is seeking a senior data architect to lead the team building and owning our governed, semantically-consistent research data foundation. You will shape architecture across legacy systems and cloud platforms, partnering with research and IT to ensure scalable data ingestion and analytics readiness.

You will guide data governance, ontologies and knowledge graphs while collaborating with AI/ML and computational chemistry teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing research or scientific data architectures, ideally in drug discovery or life sciences.
• Hands-on experience with a scientific data platform (Benchling or comparable LIMS/ELN) and with requirements engineering (URS/FRS).
• Strong grounding in semantic technologies - ontologies, controlled vocabularies, knowledge graphs and F.A.I.R. / ontology-based data management.
• Experience with cloud lakehouse platforms (Databricks or equivalent) and data pipelines feeding analytics and AI/ML.
• Demonstrated ownership of data governance - metadata, lineage, and reference data.

Responsibilities

• Own the research data model and direct configuration of new workflows with architecting new platforms.
• Co-lead migration of legacy assay data into the future foundation with data management and IT leads.
• Build the semantic layer for Zealand Pharma, adapting ontologies and vocabularies for a governed data platform.
• Own research data governance including metadata, lineage and reference data.
• Architect the research data lake and knowledge graphs to support analytics and AI.
• Partner with AI/ML, computational chemistry and agentic-workflow leads as their data source.

Skills

Data architecture

Requirements engineering

Semantic technologies

Data governance

Leadership

Biologics data knowledge

Tools

Benchling

Databricks

ELN/LIMS

Job description

Zealand Pharma is seeking a senior data architect to lead the team building and owning our governed, semantically-consistent research data foundation. You will shape architecture across legacy systems and cloud platforms, partnering with research and IT to ensure scalable data ingestion and analytics readiness.

You will guide data governance, ontologies and knowledge graphs while collaborating with AI/ML and computational chemistry teams.