Head of Enterprise Architecture

Roche • South San Francisco, CA

8d

About The Position

The Head of Enterprise Architecture provides senior leadership to define, evolve, and govern architecture in support of Roche’s business and digital strategy. The role leads a central architecture capability and partners closely with divisional leaders, CDTOs, and delivery teams to enable value-driven outcomes. Through visionary and inclusive leadership, the role fosters collaboration, trust, and capability growth across the architecture community. By ensuring architectural coherence across a federated technology landscape while enabling local autonomy and speed, the Head of Architecture helps shape the future of Roche. Description of the area. The Architecture function enables the organisation to plan, design, and evolve sustainable technology solutions by providing clear architectural direction, roadmaps, and standards. In close partnership with business functions and product teams, architecture brings insight into external market trends and emerging technologies to inform innovation and the next generation of digital solutions. By integrating diverse requirements into coherent solution and system designs, architecture ensures our technology landscape is aligned to enterprise principles, standards, and long-term strategic goals. The Opportunity Enterprise Architecture Strategy: Ensures that an enterprise-wide architecture vision, principles, and target architectures are developed and maintained in alignment with Roche’s business and digital strategy. Guides the team to translate strategic priorities into actionable architectural directions across domains by setting the framework for balancing long-term sustainability with near-term delivery needs. Federated Architecture Operating Model: Defines and evolves a federated operating model between central enterprise architects and distributed domain and solution architects. Facilitates alignment of local delivery efforts to enterprise-wide architectural goals by leveraging communities of practice and reusable architectural patterns. Strategic Partnership with Divisional CDTOs: Serves as a trusted advisor to divisional Chief Digital and Technology Officers (CDTOs) on technology strategies and roadmap decisions. Supports informed trade-offs to balance speed, cost, risk, reuse, and sustainability while ensuring enterprise coherence alongside divisional needs. Portfolio & Investment Alignment: Champions the integration of architectural insights into portfolio management. Establishes processes and governance to enable teams to embed architecture into investment decisions, optimize reuse, control technical debt, and mitigate risks of duplication or fragmentation in technology initiatives. Architecture Governance & Assurance: Provides leadership to design and implement a lightweight, principle-driven governance model underpinned by standards, reference architectures, and guardrails. Ensures that suitable processes are in place for embedding critical non-functional requirements, such as security, resilience, compliance, and data management, into early project planning without taking personal responsibility for every detail. Team Leadership & Organizational Management: Leads and empowers a high-performing team of Enterprise Architects, and Architecture leads cultivating an outcome-focused environment. Oversees the Business Partnering and Technology Functions while fostering collaboration, pragmatism, effective decision-making and practice adoption. Oversees the Architecture Foundations function ensuring that architecture practices are well defined and adopted. This contains as well to monitor the usage of the integrated architecture toolchain, remains fully functional and delivers value to the RDT organization. Implements consistent ways of working and active engagement forums to support the architectural strategy. Technology Evolution & Innovation: Steers efforts to monitor emerging technology trends and their potential implications for Roche's enterprise. Creates structured processes that guide decision-making on the adoption of modern platforms, enable deliberate modernization, and manage the thoughtful retirement of legacy technologies while fostering innovation throughout the organization. Communication & Influence: Conveys architectural direction and rationale through clear, business-relevant communication. Provides actionable insights and context needed to influence outcomes across Roche effectively, even in situations without direct authority.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with 10+ years of experience in enterprise or strategic architecture roles within complex, matrixed organisations
• Proven experience as a digital product owner or "digital translator" who has delivered digital use cases including advanced analytics and AI technologies.
• Strong analytical skills with a focus on outcome-driven, sustainable solutions.
• A commitment to the "One Roche" philosophy, prioritizing the success of the entire organization over individual functional silos
• Proven ability to empower teams, foster collaboration and communities of practice, and build an inclusive, high-performing culture
• Enterprise mindset with a Lean-Agile leadership approach and passion for technology trends and innovation
• Demonstrated ability to build constructive and effective relationships with business and tech leaders, developing strategy in a consultative manner.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, with the ability to deal with senior stakeholders with strong business acumen and executive presence
• Demonstrated leadership of senior leaders, organisational transformation, and workforce and capacity management
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team.
• Up-to-date knowledge of digital technology trends (AI, Data, Cloud) and a passion for translating them into new ways of working
• Proven experience defining and governing secure, compliant, enterprise-scale architectures in regulated environments
• Strong knowledge of architecture and delivery frameworks and modern digital platforms (e.g. TOGAF, SAFe, cloud, data, integration)

Nice To Haves

• Experience within the Pharmaceutical or BioTech industry is highly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Ensures that an enterprise-wide architecture vision, principles, and target architectures are developed and maintained in alignment with Roche’s business and digital strategy.
• Guides the team to translate strategic priorities into actionable architectural directions across domains by setting the framework for balancing long-term sustainability with near-term delivery needs.
• Defines and evolves a federated operating model between central enterprise architects and distributed domain and solution architects.
• Facilitates alignment of local delivery efforts to enterprise-wide architectural goals by leveraging communities of practice and reusable architectural patterns.
• Serves as a trusted advisor to divisional Chief Digital and Technology Officers (CDTOs) on technology strategies and roadmap decisions.
• Supports informed trade-offs to balance speed, cost, risk, reuse, and sustainability while ensuring enterprise coherence alongside divisional needs.
• Champions the integration of architectural insights into portfolio management.
• Establishes processes and governance to enable teams to embed architecture into investment decisions, optimize reuse, control technical debt, and mitigate risks of duplication or fragmentation in technology initiatives.
• Provides leadership to design and implement a lightweight, principle-driven governance model underpinned by standards, reference architectures, and guardrails.
• Ensures that suitable processes are in place for embedding critical non-functional requirements, such as security, resilience, compliance, and data management, into early project planning without taking personal responsibility for every detail.
• Leads and empowers a high-performing team of Enterprise Architects, and Architecture leads cultivating an outcome-focused environment.
• Oversees the Business Partnering and Technology Functions while fostering collaboration, pragmatism, effective decision-making and practice adoption.
• Oversees the Architecture Foundations function ensuring that architecture practices are well defined and adopted.
• Implements consistent ways of working and active engagement forums to support the architectural strategy.
• Steers efforts to monitor emerging technology trends and their potential implications for Roche's enterprise.
• Creates structured processes that guide decision-making on the adoption of modern platforms, enable deliberate modernization, and manage the thoughtful retirement of legacy technologies while fostering innovation throughout the organization.
• Conveys architectural direction and rationale through clear, business-relevant communication.
• Provides actionable insights and context needed to influence outcomes across Roche effectively, even in situations without direct authority.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance is available for this position.
• A discretionary annual bonus may be available based on individual and Company performance.
• This position also qualifies for the benefits detailed at the link provided below.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive