Product Lead – Digital Labs - R&D

Product Lead – Digital Labs - R&D
Cambridge, UK

About AstraZeneca

Now is the time to be part of accelerating AstraZeneca’s growth and feel your contribution. We unite our technologies, tools and platforms with our collective expertise to drive our transformational journey forward. It means we are able to better interpret data and make better data decisions.

Come and join our AZ team where you will play a pivotal role in this exciting period of development!

As the Product Lead – Digital Labs - R&D, you will be responsible for the end-to-end vision, strategy, and value realisation of our Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) capability across Early Science. You will combine strong product leadership, technical depth, and business insight to deliver a best-in-class ELN experience that accelerates scientific discovery and ensures high-quality, FAIR experimental data. Partnering closely with research scientists, domain SMEs, data and architecture teams, and IT operations, you will lead a product team to design, implement, and continuously improve ELN capabilities using Revvity Signals Notebook integrated within our broader Digital Lab ecosystem. Your leadership will span a global, matrixed organization, aligning divergent workflows and stakeholder needs into a cohesive product roadmap that delivers measurable scientific and operational outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Set product vision and strategy: Define and communicate the multi-year ELN product vision, success metrics, and value case, linking scientific needs (e.g., experiment design, data capture, reuse) with enterprise data and platform strategies. Translate this into a clear, outcomes-focused roadmap aligned with R&D priorities and portfolio timelines.

• Lead a cross-functional product team: Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of product managers, business analysts, ELN configuration specialists, integration engineers, and validation/QA. Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, accountability, and user-centric delivery in a regulated environment.

• Deliver ELN capabilities at scale: Plan and implement iterative releases that simplify experiment capture, templating, and review/approval workflows; standardise structure and metadata for FAIR data; and improve search, sharing, and compliance. Drive adoption through thoughtful change management, training, and community of practice.

• Leverage Revvity Signals Notebook: Guide the configuration and extension of Signals Notebook (or similar ELN) to meet scientific use cases across modalities and therapeutic areas. Evaluate and deploy vendor features, APIs, and plugins; influence the vendor roadmap based on AstraZeneca requirements; and lead version upgrades with minimal business disruption.

• Integrate across the lab ecosystem: Orchestrate integrations between ELN and adjacent systems (e.g., inventory/registration, LIMS, SDMS/Lab Data platforms, instrument connectivity, workflow orchestration, reporting/analytics). Ensure robust data models, taxonomies, and ontology alignment to enable traceability from experiment to decision.

• Partner with scientists and business leaders: Engage routinely with bench scientists, lab managers, and R&D leadership to elicit requirements, prioritise features, and validate that releases solve real problems. Balance usability and scientific flexibility with standardisation and compliance.

• Ensure operational excellence and compliance: Establish reliable run/operate processes (“you build it, you run it”), including SLAs, incident/problem management, and performance monitoring. Support the validation lead in validation activities to meet GxP and data integrity expectations where applicable.

• Drive engineering standards: Advocate modern product and DevOps practices—CI/CD for configurations and integrations, automated testing, environment management, and infrastructure-as-code where relevant. Lead technical debt, scalability, and security in partnership with architecture and cyber teams.

• Measure outcomes and ROI: Define and track key product indicators (e.g., adoption, time-to-document, data completeness, retrieval success, cycle time for reviews, experiment-to-insight time). Use data to inform prioritisation and demonstrate impact on research productivity and decision quality.

• Lead across the matrix: Navigate global and cross-functional governance, aligning with platform leads for Lab Data, Lab IT operations, and Automation. Coordinate with procurement, legal, finance, and vendor management to optimise licensing, costs, and contractual performance.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in a scientific or engineering field (e.g., Biology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Computer Science, IT, Data/Information Science).

• Experience defining multiyear product vision, success metrics, and outcome led roadmaps for R&D or lab informatics; ability to link scientific workflows with enterprise data/platform strategies.

• Experience leading cross-functional teams (PMs, BAs, ELN config, integrations, QA/validation) and driving a user centric, continuously improving culture in regulated settings.

• Hands on experience with Revvity Signals Notebook (or comparable ELN) configuration, extensions, APIs/plugins, vendor feature evaluation, roadmap influence, and low disruption upgrades.

• Experience in life sciences particularly with Research & Development Labs and the drug discovery lifecycle

• Success operating in global governance; coordination with Lab Data, Lab IT, Automation, and vendor management for licensing, cost, and contract outcomes.

• Experienced in leading Engineers on standard methodologies on key architectural concepts as needed and are comfortable to have trade off conversations around technical debt. You know what good looks like for a hard-working team of engineers and can lead a team there.

• Demonstrable programme delivery leadership operating within a matrix governance structure, balancing expectations and managing delivery commitments across IT platforms, procurement, legal, finance and Senior scientific stakeholders.

In Office Requirement:

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

Competitive salary and benefits package on offer!

The successful candidate will have access to a flexible employee benefits fund, including holiday purchase and flexible time off, pension contributions, Share Save Plans, A performance recognition scheme and a competitive, generous remuneration package.

Date Posted

31-Mar-2026

Closing Date

12-Apr-2026

Our mission is to build an inclusive and equitable environment. We want people to feel they belong at AstraZeneca and Alexion, starting with our recruitment process. We welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of characteristics. We offer reasonable adjustments/accommodations to help all candidates to perform at their best. If you have a need for any adjustments/accommodations, please complete the section in the application form.