Senior Azure Data Architect - Lead Data & Life Sciences

Cognizant; Wilmington (NC); Hybrid; USD 88,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance

Paid holidays + PTO

401(k) plan

Long-term/Short-term Disability

Paid Parental Leave

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking a senior data architecture leader to drive enterprise Azure data strategy across large programs. You will guide data modeling, governance, and security while coordinating onshore/offshore teams. Strong Life Sciences CTMS/EDC experience is highly valued.

You will mentor data architects, drive modernization to Azure, and articulate technical decisions to executive leadership in a hybrid work model based in Wilmington.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering/architecture with hands-on Azure data services.
• Experience in Life Sciences Clinical R&D projects (EDC/CTMS/eTMF), Veeva CTMS preferred.
• Proven ability to lead large, multi-disciplinary data programs and architecture reviews.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive enterprise data architecture roadmap across Azure.
• Architect high-volume data platforms for batch, real-time, and streaming pipelines.
• Lead data modeling across domains to support analytics and AI/ML use cases.
• Define data governance, lineage, and quality frameworks.
• Own security and compliance architecture including encryption and RBAC.
• Lead client architecture reviews and executive presentations.
• Mentor onshore/offshore data architects and engineers.
• Drive modernization/migration to Azure and multi-cloud strategies.
• Establish CI/CD and IaC practices; drive FinOps across data services.
• Perform architecture governance, risk assessments, and sign-offs.

Skills

Azure data architecture

Leadership & mentoring

Architecture governance

CI/CD & DevOps

Terraform/Bicep

Data modeling (3NF/Star/Snowflake/Data

Tools

Azure Data Factory

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Databricks

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Azure SQL Database/Managed Instance

Cosmos DB

Microsoft Fabric

Purview/Collibra

Job description

Cognizant is seeking a senior data architecture leader to drive enterprise Azure data strategy across large programs. You will guide data modeling, governance, and security while coordinating onshore/offshore teams. Strong Life Sciences CTMS/EDC experience is highly valued.

You will mentor data architects, drive modernization to Azure, and articulate technical decisions to executive leadership in a hybrid work model based in Wilmington.