Lead IT Architect

McKesson is an impact-driven, Fortune 10 company that touches virtually every aspect of healthcare. We are known for delivering insights, products, and services that make quality care more accessible and affordable. Here, we focus on the health, happiness, and well-being of you and those we serve – we care.
What you do at McKesson matters. We foster a culture where you can grow, make an impact, and are empowered to bring new ideas. Together, we thrive as we shape the future of health for patients, our communities, and our people. If you want to be part of tomorrow’s health today, we want to hear from you.
The Lead IT Architect serves as the strategic architecture leader across multiple products and value streams within the Specialty technology portfolio. This role is responsible for defining and driving architecture direction, enabling scalable growth, improving platform reuse, and ensuring technical investments align with business objectives.
The position works across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to establish architecture standards, support strategic planning activities, and guide technology decisions that impact multiple teams and products. The Lead IT Architect plays an active role in program increment (PI) planning, architectural runway development, and long-term technology strategy, helping teams balance immediate delivery needs with future scalability and modernization.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, portfolio-level technology governance, and healthcare technology environments. While artificial intelligence is not the primary focus of the position, candidates should be comfortable evaluating AI-enabled capabilities, supporting AI feature development, and establishing appropriate architecture guidance for AI-related solutions.
Key Responsibilities
Define and maintain the architecture vision, roadmap, an technical strategy across multiple products and value streams.
Partner with product, engineering, and business leaders to align technology investments with organizational priorities.
Provide architectural leadership for cross-product initiatives, shared services, integration patterns, and platform capabilities.
Establish and govern architecture standards, design principles, and reusable technology patterns.
Lead architecture discussions and decision-making during strategic planning and PI planning activities.
Develop and maintain the architectural runway required to support future business and technology objectives.
Guide the design of distributed, cloud-native solutions utilizing APIs, event-driven architectures, microservices, and modern integration patterns.
Drive consistency across products by identifying opportunities for platform reuse and reducing duplicated technology investments.
Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture and shared-service organizations to ensure alignment with broader technology strategies.
Provide architectural oversight for third-party vendors, implementation partners, and systems integrators.
Ensure solutions support healthcare compliance, data privacy, security, and interoperability requirements.
Mentor architects, senior engineers, and technical leaders to strengthen architecture practices and technical decision-making across the organization.
Evaluate emerging technologies and AI-enabled capabilities, providing guidance on appropriate adoption and implementation within the portfolio.
Priority will be given to candidates residing in the Columbus, OH metropolitan area.
We are unable to provide sponsorship for this role, presently or in the future.
Minimum Qualifications
Degree or equivalent and typically requires 10+ years of relevant experience. Less years required if has relevant Master’s or Doctorate qualifications.
Critical Skills
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
12+ years of experience in architecture, software engineering, or senior technical leadership roles.
8+ years of experience working within software development organizations and modern delivery environments.
3+ years of experience defining architecture strategy across multiple products, platforms, programs, or value streams.
Experience establishing and governing architecture standards adopted by independent product or engineering teams.
Demonstrated success designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native solutions.
Experience with microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven architectures, and enterprise integration patterns.
Experience developing architecture roadmaps and managing architectural dependencies across multiple teams.
Experience presenting technology strategies, recommendations, and tradeoffs to senior leadership.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience within healthcare, pharmacy, payer, provider, or other regulated technology environments.
Experience participating in large-scale planning activities and translating business strategy into technology roadmaps.
Experience designing systems that manage regulated or sensitive data.
Working knowledge of healthcare interoperability and compliance standards, including FHIR and HIPAA.
Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct management authority.
Experience working within SAFe or other scaled agile frameworks.
Knowledge of NCPDP standards and healthcare interoperability ecosystems.
Experience creating shared platforms or reusable enterprise capabilities used across multiple product teams.
Experience overseeing architecture deliverables from vendors, consulting partners, or systems integrators.
Familiarity with AI-enabled product features, AI-assisted development tools, and governance considerations related to AI adoption.
Experience mentoring architects and developing architecture communities of practice.
What Success Looks Like
Within the first 12 months, the successful candidate will:
Establish a clear architecture vision and roadmap across supported products and value streams.
Improve alignment and consistency of architectural decisions across teams.
Increase adoption of reusable platforms, shared services, and architectural standards.
Reduce technical duplication and improve long-term scalability across the portfolio.
Create stronger alignment between strategic business priorities, PI planning activities, and technology investments.
Serve as a trusted architecture advisor to engineering, product, and business leadership.
Introduce practical guidance for evaluating and implementing AI-enabled capabilities where they create measurable business value.
Why This Role Is Unique