Senior Director - Enterprise AI Platforms

Senior Director - Enterprise AI Platforms

Location: Barcelona, Spain

At AstraZeneca, we pride ourselves on crafting a collaborative culture that champions knowledge-sharing, ambitious thinking and innovation – ultimately providing employees with the opportunity to work across teams, functions and even the globe.

Recognizing the importance of individualized flexibility, our ways of working allow employees to balance personal and work commitments while ensuring we continue to create a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork by engaging face-to-face in our offices 3 days a week.

Our dedication to sustainability is also central to our culture and part of what makes AstraZeneca a great place to work. We know the health of people, the planet and our business are interconnected, which is why we’re taking ambitious action to tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time, from climate change to access to healthcare and disease prevention.

About the Role

Our goal is to build the enterprise AI platform that enables the next generation of pharmaceutical innovation - putting the world's most capable and secure AI infrastructure in the hands of thousands of scientists, researchers, and developers across AstraZeneca. As the Senior Director Enterprise AI Platforms, you will be a key strategic leader driving the development and deployment of pioneering AI solutions within our global biopharmaceutical business. Join us in our quest to revolutionize healthcare and make a meaningful impact on patients' lives worldwide!

We're looking for an exceptional product and technical leader who has built enterprise AI platforms at scale, deeply understands what makes data scientists and ML engineers successful, regularly ships platforms that other teams bet their research and business outcomes on, and is eager to dive into everything from ML infrastructure architecture to scientific community building. The best candidates will be extremely hands-on, obsessed with developer and scientist experience, and opinionated about a future where researchers have all the AI tools they can imagine at their fingertips.

You'll lead a team of AI engineers and product managers globally who work on everything from ML platform design and SDK development, to cost optimization and resource management, to documentation and developer tools, to enterprise partnerships and regulatory compliance. You'll partner with our research, IT, and business teams to balance cutting-edge AI capabilities with production reliability and GxP compliance. Ultimately, you'll help us build the platform that scientists choose when they're developing the most important therapeutic breakthroughs in the world.

Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership: Own the complete vision for how scientists and developers build with AI at AstraZeneca, from the core ML infrastructure to the tools, SDKs, and integrations that make AI accessible across every research and development environment.

Scientific Champion & Ecosystem Builder: Build partnerships that extend our AI platform's reach through integrations, ecosystem programs, and distribution relationships with cloud providers and technology vendors. Engage directly with major partners on business relationships and technical decisions, participating in architecture reviews and shaping product roadmaps based on pharmaceutical deployment patterns.

Enterprise Platform Product Leadership: Ship capabilities that enable production at scale: security controls, GxP compliance frameworks, enterprise authentication, and SLAs for mission-critical drug discovery applications. Design platforms that enterprise architects and regulatory teams can confidently adopt, with monitoring, governance, and documentation that answers both technical and compliance questions. Partner with internal customers to build products that meet their scientific needs while enabling new research breakthroughs.

Product Execution at Scale: Partner with engineering on architecture for massive ML workloads, including AWS infrastructure scaling, model deployment pipelines, and reliability guarantees. Ship the essentials: platforms that unlock the most intelligence from our data, documentation that pre-empts questions, error handling that aids debugging, and monitoring that provides application visibility across the entire ML lifecycle.

Budget and Resource Management: Strategically manage substantial budgets including FTE, outsourced service providers, and professional services, ensuring cost-effective delivery to sophisticated scientific and business partner groups while maintaining world-class platform capabilities.

Essential Skills/Experience

Extensive experience in product management or technical leadership, including at least 5 years in senior roles leading enterprise AI platforms, ML infrastructure, or developer platform products

Developing technical strategies and aligning with partners across a sophisticated global organization

Influencing and communicating strategy

Budget and resource management (FTE, Outsourced Service Providers, Professional Services) in the context of delivery to sophisticated partner groups.

Strong software coding skills, with proficiency in Python, however exceptional ability in any language will be recognized.

Experience leading an enterprise platform and service, handling new customer demand and feature requests.

Experience in leading a team of technical experts

Experience with SAFe agile principles and practices.

Experience working with internal security standards and frameworks

B.S. degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or related quantitative or analytical field

Significant experience with AWS cloud environments & services (e.g., SageMaker, Athena, S3, EC2, RDS, Glue, etc.) is crucial.

Proven knowledge of building data science and machine learning environments to a production standard.

Modern DevOps mentality, using best of breed DevOps toolchains, such as Docker, Git.

Experience with infrastructure as code technology such as Ansible, Terraform and Cloud Formation

Adapt standard machine learning methods to best exploit modern parallel environments (e.g., distributed clusters, multicore SMP, and GPU)

Desirable Skills/Experience

Experience in implementing & maintaining GxP compliant life science systems will be looked upon very favourably.

Certification in appropriate areas will be viewed favourably.

Experience building large scale data processing pipelines. e.g., Hadoop/Spark and SQL.

Multi cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Ready to lead the transformation of healthcare through AI? Join us in building the platform that will power the next generation of life-changing medicines and make a meaningful impact on patients' lives worldwide.

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.

At AstraZeneca, we are driven by a shared purpose to make a difference in patients' lives through innovation and collaboration. Our dynamic environment encourages continuous learning and growth as we explore new technologies and challenge conventional approaches. By partnering across functions and leveraging our data capabilities, we empower our teams to achieve remarkable outcomes. Join us as we shape the future of healthcare and contribute to AstraZeneca's mission of delivering life-changing medicines.