Lead Architect

The Lead Architect for BioFAIR is responsible for defining and guiding the technical vision, architectural strategy, and design principles for a national, federated life‑science digital research infrastructure. This position blends aspects of systems architecture and solutions architecture, ensuring BioFAIR creates coherent, interoperable, sustainable, and FAIR-aligned services, delivered by distributed UK partners, that can be embedded in a variety of different life sciences settings.

This role requires technical leadership, unambiguous decision-making, and strong communication across multiple independent teams and stakeholder groups. The Lead Architect accelerates and supports the work of delivery partners by ensuring BioFAIR’s architecture is robust, resilient and loosely coupled, and BioFAIR’s technology is interoperable, easy to integrate, and aligned with long-term research‑infrastructure goals. BioFAIR is trying to build a collaborative network of expertise across the UK, so the Lead Architect must also be able to listen to the needs of delivery partners, adapt to changing requirements, and respond quickly and decisively to adapt the BioFAIR architecture and technology as appropriate.

The ideal person for this role brings clear, confident architectural judgement, an ability to make complex ideas understandable, and the calm authority to guide diverse partners toward coherent technical decisions. They combine systems-level rigour with user-focused pragmatism, build trust quickly, and foster collaboration across institutions. They recognise that in collaborative projects, architecture must be socio-technical: the team structures and the services they deliver are two sides of the same coin. Adaptable and intellectually curious, they mentor others generously and help create a shared sense of direction within a distributed, multi-stakeholder environment.