Enterprise Architect - Scientific Compute

Join us at EIT:

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

Your Role:

At EIT we are seeking an experienced and detailed orientated Enterprise Architect to own and evolve the architecture of our highly ambitious, large-scale scientific computing environment. This position sits at the centre of our technology strategy, governing architecture across distributed GPU and CPU workloads running at global scale within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Success in this role requires both technical expertise and strong relationship-building. You will collaborate closely with scientific compute teams, engineering, research computing, data and cloud groups as you develop a standardised, scalable and high-performing architectural model for the institute. This is a hands-on leadership role for a practitioner with demonstrable experience designing, governing, and operating enterprise-wide architectures for complex, compute-intensive scientific or research-driven organisations.

Your Responsibilities:

Enterprise Architecture Ownership

• Collaborate with research group technical leadership to continuously evolve the enterprise architecture for large-scale scientific compute environments hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• Define target-state architectures that enables EIT’s institutes to do their best work, balancing standardisation, flexibility, scalability, performance, resilience, and security across heterogeneous scientific workloads.
• Translate organisational strategy and scientific priorities into coherent architectural roadmaps.

Collaboration & Influence

• Act as a trusted partner to scientific compute business unit leads, engaging deeply with their priorities, constraints, and roadmaps.
• Lead through influence rather than mandate, bringing stakeholders along a shared journey toward standardisation and architectural maturity.
• Balance competing demands across disciplines while maintaining a coherent enterprise-wide operating model.

Architecture Governance

• Own and chair the Architecture Review Board (ARB), defining its remit, processes, and decision-making frameworks.
• Ensure architectural decisions are transparent, pragmatic, and aligned to enterprise standards without becoming a bottleneck to innovation.
• Define principles, standards, and reference architectures, with clear guidance on when and how deviations are acceptable.

Data & Storage Architecture

• Work closely with the Data Architect to define and own data and storage architecture standards across the scientific compute environment.
• Collaborate with data leaders to maintain comprehensive data classification models, ensuring alignment with security, compliance, performance, and cost requirements.
• Guide architectural decisions around data lifecycle management, tiering, sovereignty, and cross-region access patterns.

DevOps & Platform Standards

• Drive the standardisation of DevOps and platform engineering practices, promoting automation, repeatability, and reliability at scale.
• Work closely with engineering teams to define best-practice CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and operational models that enable institutes to operate at their best.
• Ensure standards are practical, adopted, and continuously improved rather than theoretical.

Large-Scale Scientific Compute

• Architect and govern the centralised standards and processes that enable multi-region GPU and CPU estates that support diverse scientific disciplines and compute patterns (e.g. HPC, AI/ML, simulation, data-intensive research).
• Ensure architectural consistency while accommodating domain-specific requirements and rapidly evolving research needs.
• Drive best practices for workload placement, resource optimisation, and cross-region compute orchestration within OCI.

Essential Skills, Qualifications & Experience:

• Extensive, demonstrable experience as an Enterprise Architect owning architecture for large, complex, compute-intensive environments.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and operating architectures within tier one cloud infrastructure providers, particularly at scale.
• Proven track record working with GPU and CPU-heavy scientific or research workloads across multiple regions.
• Strong experience defining and governing enterprise architecture standards, principles, and review processes.
• Expertise in data architecture, storage platforms, and data classification models in large, distributed environments.
• Significant experience influencing senior technical and scientific stakeholders in matrixed organisations.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Background in scientific research, HPC, AI/ML platforms, or data-intensive research environments.
• Experience modernising or standardising architectures across previously federated or decentralised teams.
• Strong understanding of cost management and optimisation for large-scale cloud compute environments.
• Experience working within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure at an enterprise scale.

Our Benefits:

• Competitive salary + travel allowance + bonus
• Enhanced holiday + options to buy additional days
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electric Car Scheme
• Childcare benefit

Working Together – What It Involves:

• You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary.
• You will live in, or within easy commuting distance of, Oxford (or be willing to relocate) and can commit to a hybrid working arrangement.