Description Penn Medicine is dedicated to our tripartite mission of providing the highest level of care to patients, conducting innovative research, and educating future leaders in the field of medicine. Working for this leading academic medical center means collaboration with top clinical, technical and business professionals across all disciplines.
Today at Penn Medicine, someone will make a breakthrough. Someone will heal a heart, deliver hopeful news, and give comfort and reassurance. Our employees shape our future each day. Are you living your life's work?
Entity: Corporate Services
Department: Enterprise Technology Architecture and Strategy
Location: Hybrid, 3535 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Summary:
- Reporting to the Corporate Director, the Senior Principal Enterprise Architect - Infrastructure & Disaster Recovery Strategy is a senior individual contributor role responsible for defining, owning, and governing the organization's enterprise infrastructure architecture strategy and enterprise-wide Disaster Recovery strategy within a complex, highly regulated academic healthcare environment. This role responsible ensuring that infrastructure investments are architecturally coherent, resilient by design, and aligned to the organization's clinical, research, operational, and regulatory obligations.
- The Senior Principal leads the definition of the organization's enterprise DR strategy as a primary near-term deliverable, establishing recovery principles, recovery tier classifications, RTO/RPO standards, and DR architecture patterns across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Concurrently, this role governs enterprise infrastructure architecture standards across compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and hybrid cloud environments, ensuring that infrastructure design decisions are consistent, scalable, and supportable across the health system's multi-entity environment.
- This role operates at the intersection of infrastructure architecture, application recovery, cybersecurity, and clinical risk, ensuring that the organization's systems - including those supporting patient care, research operations, and regulated administrative functions - are grounded in sound architectural principles and covered by auditable recovery frameworks. In close partnership with Infrastructure leadership, Application owners, Cybersecurity, Risk Management, Clinical Informatics, and Finance, the Senior Principal balances architectural rigor with organizational risk tolerance and regulatory obligations. This role does not own infrastructure operations or day-to-day DR execution; those responsibilities reside within Infrastructure and Operations. The role owns the strategy, architecture standards, and governance that make resilient, well-governed infrastructure possible at enterprise scale.
Responsibilities:
- Defines and owns the organization's enterprise-wide Disaster Recovery Strategy, establishing recovery principles, governance standards, and a multi-year DR architecture roadmap that addresses fragmented and inconsistent recovery capabilities across infrastructure, platforms, applications, and clinical environments.
- Validates the enterprise DR strategy against clinical and business priorities and advises senior leadership on recovery investment feasibility, risk exposure, and patient safety implications.
- Develops and maintains enterprise recovery tier classification standards, including RTO and RPO frameworks, system criticality tiers, and recovery priority models that reflect the organization's clinical, research, operational, and regulatory risk obligations.
- Designs and governs DR and resilience architecture patterns across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, ensuring recovery architecture is built into system and platform design as a baseline requirement rather than addressed as a retrofit.
- Leads enterprise DR scenario planning to anticipate major failure events and ensures recovery architecture is resilient beyond nominal recovery assumptions.
- Establishes enterprise DR architecture standards and guardrails applicable across infrastructure domains, including compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and cloud services, ensuring consistency and auditability of recovery capabilities across all environments.
- Partners with Application owners and Solution Architects to ensure application recovery requirements are architecturally aligned with enterprise DR standards, and that application-level RTO/RPO commitments are supportable by the underlying infrastructure and platform architecture.
- Maps and governs cross domain dependencies across infrastructure, applications, clinical, and research systems to inform DR architecture, recovery tiers, and sequencing plans.
- Collaborates with the Cybersecurity and Risk Management teams to ensure DR architecture standards address cyber-resilience requirements, including ransomware recovery design, immutable backup architecture, and recovery isolation patterns appropriate for a HIPAA-regulated environment.
- Leads enterprise DR architecture review processes, providing architectural assurance that proposed infrastructure, platform, and application designs incorporate recovery capabilities consistent with their assigned criticality tier and organizational risk tolerance.
- Develops and maintains enterprise DR architecture documentation, including reference architectures, design patterns, standards, and architectural decision records, ensuring documentation is suitable for internal governance, regulatory audit, and accreditation review.
- Partners with Clinical Informatics, digital health, and research leadership to ensure DR architecture standards address the specific recovery requirements of clinical systems, patient-facing applications, research computing environments, and regulated data platforms.
- Defines DR architecture maturity assessment frameworks; evaluates current-state recovery capabilities against enterprise standards; identifies architectural gaps and risk exposure; and provides prioritized remediation roadmaps to leadership.
- Represents the Infrastructure and DR Architecture domain in enterprise architecture review boards, risk governance committees, and relevant executive and compliance forums; communicates DR strategy, risk posture, and architecture maturity to senior leadership and auditors.
- Monitors emerging trends in infrastructure resilience, disaster recovery technologies, cloud-native recovery capabilities, and regulatory developments; assesses implications for enterprise DR strategy and architecture standards.
- Serves as a senior architectural thought leader and trusted advisor to infrastructure, application, clinical, and executive stakeholders on enterprise resilience and disaster recovery architecture matters.
- Performs duties in accordance with Penn Medicine and entity values, policies, and procedures.
- Other duties as assigned to support the unit, department, entity, and health system organization.
Education or Equivalent Experience:
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field is required.
- 10+ years Information Technology experience, with 5+ years in Enterprise Architecture or Infrastructure Architecture is required.
- 5+ years Hands-on DR strategy, DR architecture, or enterprise resilience program experience in enterprise or regulated environments is required.
We believe that the best care for our patients starts with the best care for our employees. Our employee benefits programs help our employees get healthy and stay healthy. We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits program that includes one of the finest prepaid tuition assistance programs in the region. Penn Medicine employees are actively engaged and committed to our mission. Together we will continue to make medical advances that help people live longer, healthier lives.
Live Your Life's Work
We are an Equal Opportunity employer. Candidates are considered for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, marital status, familial status, genetic information, domestic or sexual violence victim status, citizenship status, military status, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable law.
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