IT Director, Data & AI Architecture

Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. Our portfolio of life-changing technologies spans the spectrum of healthcare, with leading businesses and products in diagnostics, medical devices, nutritionals and branded generic medicines. Our 122,000 colleagues serve people in more than 160 countries.
JOB DESCRIPTION:
About Abbott
Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. Our portfolio of life-changing technologies spans diagnostics, medical devices, nutrition, and branded generic medicines. With 115,000 colleagues serving people in more than 160 countries, Abbott is committed to advancing healthcare through innovation, data, and technology.
The Opportunity
Reporting to the Director of Information Management, Data & Analytics, this person will play a critical role in defining and delivering Abbott's enterprise data and AI architecture vision. This leader will architect scalable, secure, and AI-ready data platforms, enable advanced analytics and AI use cases, and establish the technical standards that support Abbott's transition to a modern data ecosystem.
The IT Director, Data and AI Architecture serves as Abbott's principal technical authority for enterprise data architecture, cloud data platforms, AI-ready ecosystems, and modern data engineering. This individual is expected to operate as the senior-most data architecture leader, guiding architectural strategy, reviewing solution designs, mentoring architects and engineers, and driving key technology decisions across Abbott's enterprise data landscape.
This leader will establish the technical blueprint for Abbott's next-generation data platforms, ensuring scalable, secure, high-performing, and AI-ready architectures that accelerate analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence initiatives across the enterprise.
This person serves as a technical authority for Enterprise Data Architecture and AI programs, providing guidance, governance, and decision-making support across the organization. We are seeking someone with the ability to define, challenge, and influence architectural standards, strategies, and technology roadmaps.
Functions as a senior hands-on technical leader and trusted advisor, rather than a people manager. Acts as the primary go-to expert for complex architectural decisions and technology challenges. Drives and influences key technology and architecture decisions to ensure alignment with business objectives, scalability, and innovation goals.
What You'll Work On
Technical Architecture Leadership
Lead architecture reviews for major data and analytics initiatives.
Serve as a trusted technical advisor to engineering, architecture, and business leaders on enterprise data strategy and architecture decisions.
Define reference architectures and implementation standards for Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Services, and related cloud technologies.
Drive architectural decisions related to data lakehouse design, medallion architectures, semantic layers, metadata services, data observability, vector databases, and enterprise AI platforms.
Define enterprise information architecture, canonical data models, domain ownership boundaries, and data product standards that support interoperability, scalability, and AI consumption.
Review and challenge engineering designs to ensure scalability, resiliency, performance, maintainability, and cost optimization.
Partner directly with engineering teams to solve complex technical architecture challenges and accelerate delivery of strategic initiatives.
Chair architecture review boards and provide final architecture recommendations for critical data, analytics, and AI investments.
Maintain hands-on awareness of modern data engineering, cloud, analytics, and AI technologies.
Design enterprise-scale lakehouse architectures utilizing Databricks, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage platforms.
Data Engineering & Platform Architecture
Define architecture standards for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, observability, DataOps, CI/CD, and platform automation.
Establish patterns supporting structured, semi-structured, streaming, and unstructured data workloads.
Define enterprise integration standards leveraging APIs, event-driven architectures, messaging platforms, and real-time data processing.
Guide implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), platform engineering, containerization, and automated deployment practices.
Partner with infrastructure and platform teams to optimize performance, reliability, scalability, and cost management across enterprise data platforms.
Data Products & Information Architecture
Define enterprise standards for data products, data contracts, metadata management, discoverability, interoperability, and lifecycle management.
Drive implementation of Data Mesh and federated data ownership principles across Abbott business domains.
Establish architecture patterns that enable reusable, trusted, and scalable data assets.
Partner with business and technology leaders to translate strategic priorities into scalable enterprise information architectures.
AI & Advanced Analytics Architecture
Architect AI-ready data ecosystems supporting machine learning, predictive analytics, Generative AI, agentic AI, and advanced analytics workloads.
Design reference architectures for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), semantic search, vector databases, knowledge repositories, and enterprise AI platforms.
Define enterprise approaches for embeddings, vector storage, semantic retrieval, knowledge management, and AI-ready data foundations.
Establish LLMOps and MLOps standards for model deployment, monitoring, observability, governance, and lifecycle management.
Define architectural standards for feature stores, training datasets, metadata, lineage, and model operationalization.
Evaluate emerging AI technologies and translate them into practical enterprise adoption roadmaps.
Lead AI architecture assessments and provide technical recommendations for strategic AI investments.
Data Governance & Trust by Design
Partner with Data Governance and Information Management teams to ensure architectural alignment with metadata, lineage, master data, data quality, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.
Define architectural controls that enable trusted, auditable, and governed enterprise data.
Promote "trust by design" principles throughout Abbott's data and AI ecosystem.
Required Qualifications
Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.