Associate Director, Data Products, Operational Data Strategy

Location: Barcelona - Spain (3 days working from the office and 2 days working from home)

Introduction to the role

The Operational Data Strategy team are looking for an exceptional candidate to support a growing portfolio of data assets. Reporting to the Director, Data Products, the Associate Director, Data Products will set the vision and drive the execution of a suite of data products that will be utilised across R&D. The role translates business problems into compelling product capabilities, orchestrates multidisciplinary delivery teams, and ensures every release delivers measurable value to the business. 

The successful candidate will own end-to-end product lifecycle management for assigned data products. They shape product strategy in partnership with R&D IT and functional stakeholders; create and maintain outcome-driven roadmaps; manage product backlogs and technical debt; govern data quality, privacy, and FAIR principles; and champion user adoption and continuous iteration. Acting as the single point of accountability, they balance short-term deliverables with long-term platform scalability while navigating a regulated, global environment. 

Typical Accountabilities  

• Engage business leaders to surface high-value use-cases for data products under your remit; convert those needs into clear product charters, north-star metrics, and release plans. 

• Partner with architecture and engineering leads to design solution blueprints that blend structured data assets, unstructured document repositories, and advanced AI services and related tooling 

• Drive agile ceremonies, backlog prioritisation, and sprint planning, ensuring every user story is testable, regulatory compliant, and traceable to business value. 

• Protect and enhance data quality by embedding robust stewardship practices and metadata management across structured clinical data and document-derived entities. 

• Define product KPIs (e.g., query success rate, time-to-insight, document-extraction precision) and manage benefit realisation against agreed targets. 

• Lead change-management, communication, and training efforts so that clinicians, trial managers, and data scientists rapidly adopt new features and workflows. 

• Identify and mitigate risks spanning technical feasibility, ethics, regulatory constraints (ICH E6(R3), GDPR), and model-governance requirements. 

Education, Qualifications, Skills and Experience 

Essential

• Candidates must demonstrate proven success guiding data-heavy products from concept to value realisation, ideally within life-sciences R&D  

• Fluent in product-management principles, agile and DevOps ways-of-working; skilled at gathering and documenting technical requirements, data mapping, user stories, and process flows. 

• Strong technical background and familiarity with foundational data-engineering topics such as data modelling, data lakes, and APIs. 

• Ability to explain transformer models, vector search, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation at a level sufficient to align with architects and data scientists. 

• A bachelor’s degree in a scientific, technical, or quantitative discipline is required. 

• Proficiency in English (spoken and written). 

• Knowledge of SQL, data querying, and data manipulation.

Desirable

• Familiarity with enterprise data platforms (Starburst, Snowflake). 

• Familiarity with data visualization tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or similar. 

• Understanding of operational data management principles and methodologies. 

• Knowledge of data governance, data quality management, and regulatory requirements for healthcare data.    

• Experience with clinical-trial systems (e.g., CTMS, eTMF, CDMS), knowledge of Snowflake ecosystem services (Cortex AI, Snowpipe, Streamlit in Snowflake), and a track record of delivering analytics products will be advantageous.  

• A master’s or PhD, GxP familiarity, and agile certifications (e.g. SAFe) are desirable differentiators. 

Date Posted

23-mar-2026

Closing Date

09-abr-2026

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.