Director- Data Engineering

Job Title: Director, RDU IT - Data Engineering

GCL: F

Introduction to role:

Are you ready to lead the charge in transforming patient-centric data and AI platforms? As the Director, RDU IT – Data Engineering at Alexion, you'll spearhead the architecture and delivery of innovative enterprise-scale data platforms and pipelines, with AI at the core. Your mission? To drive value from information by merging modern data engineering practices with AI-assisted development, operations, and governance, enhancing speed, quality, and reliability. Collaborate with business, data science, analytics, and product teams to idfind opportunitiesshape platform strategy, and deliver secure, compliant data products. Champion responsible AI adoption across the data lifecycle while ensuring privacy, security, and regulatory compliance. Are you ready to evolve Alexion’s data platforms with AI-driven capabilities?

Accountabilities:

- Lead platform evolution by accomplishing the roadmap for cloud-native data platforms (AWS + Snowflake-centric), integrating AI-native patterns for reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
- Establish an AI-assisted SDLC for data with standards for prompts, reviews, and model-assisted outputs.
- Architect and deliver enterprise ELT/ETL pipelines and domain-oriented data products that meet FAIR and Trusted data product principles.
- Implement AI-enabled observability for data quality, drift detection, anomaly detection, SLA forecasting, and incident triage; enable self-healing runbooks.
- Operationalize data governance frameworks relevant to life sciences with AI-assisted policy checks, bias detection, and automated audit trails.
- Mentor distributed teams on modern data engineering and responsible AI usage.
- Lead provisioning, RBAC/PBAC, and environment for Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, Fivetran, GitHub; automate with Infrastructure as Code.

Essential Skills/Experience:

- A Master's Degree from an accredited college or university with a major in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering.
- Minimum of 10 years of experience in data engineering, business analysis and data management.
- Experience implementing AI in data engineering: AI-assisted ELT (code scaffolding, test generation, schema mapping), self-healing pipelines, anomaly/drift detection, and intelligent runbooks.
- AI-driven documentation, lineage, and metadata enrichment; semantic search over catalogs; automated PII detection and tagging.
- Copilot-style tools within IDEs to accelerate safe development.
- Exceptional verbal and written communication and creative problem-solving skills including the ability to convey analytical insights in actionable business terms.
- Highly motivated self-starter with the confidence and ability to present complex information concisely and effectively to all audiences, including senior leaders and groups.
- Strong analytical, logical thinking and interpersonal skills, backed by a logical approach, and capable of managing multiple projects simultaneously.
- Ability to anticipate future business trends and to integrate that context into IT and business practices.
- Track record of effective functional and multi-functional collaboration and leadership.
- Diligent, self-starter, able to work both independently and in a team environment.
- Desire and ability to learn/implement new tools and analytic capabilities.
- Experience designing and developing methods, processes, and systems to consolidate and analyse structured and unstructured data from diverse sources including large volume sources.
- Experience developing and using advanced software applications, algorithms, querying and automated processes to cleanse, integrate and evaluate datasets and models.
- Proven ability to design, articulate, and deliver complex, large-scale data solutions that are scalable, robust, secure, and resilient.
- Experience using dbT, Fivetran, GitHub, Apache Airflow.
- Extensive hands-on experience with SQL, Python and building and maintaining ETL / ELT frameworks and data orchestration pipelines.
- Expertise in Snowflake concepts like setting up resource monitors, RBAC controls, virtual warehouse sizing, query performance tuning, Zero copy clone, data sharing, time travel, and integrated tools like SnowSQL, SnowPipe, Streamlit, Cortex.
- Experience in data quality and observability tools and methodologies.
- Understanding of FAIR and Trusted data product principles.
- Emphasize knowledge or experience in data governance frameworks and compliance standards relevant to the life sciences industry like GDPR and HIPAA.
- Data Pipeline: experience with ETL/ELT/Data Loading tools using Apache Airflow, AWS Glue with Python.
- Experience leveraging AI technologies to develop ELT processes and automate self-healing data pipelines.
- Experience working with data science operations teams who are applying serverless architectures, Kubernetes, Docker/containerization.
- Analytic data architecture and data modelling concepts and principles including data lakes, warehouses and marts.
- Data warehousing methodologies and modelling techniques (Kimball, 3NF, Star Schema).

Desirable Skills/Experience:

- Prior experience of 10+ years as a Data Platform or Technical Leader in data preferably in the biotech/pharma industry.
- Advanced experience with cloud platforms beyond AWS like Azure, Google Cloud, Databricks especially for data engineering and storage solutions.
- Experience establishing data product marketplaces semantic layers and AI-powered discovery for self-service analytics.

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 connect across the entire business to influence patient outcomes positively. Our work is impactful as we drive exciting transformation towards becoming a digital enterprise. Collaborate with leading experts using latest techniques to create novel solutions. Our inclusive team thrives on diversity—pooling knowledge from various functions to decode business needs. We are committed to delivering greater value for patients every day through innovation.

Ready to make a difference? Apply now to join our dynamic team!

Date Posted

Closing Date

Alexion is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We are committed to fostering a culture of belonging where every single person can belong because of their uniqueness. The Company will not make decisions about employment, training, compensation, promotion, and other terms and conditions of employment based on race, color, religion, creed or lack thereof, sex, sexual orientation, age, ancestry, national origin, ethnicity, citizenship status, marital status, pregnancy, (including childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), parental status (including adoption or surrogacy), military status, protected veteran status, disability, medical condition, gender identity or expression, genetic information, mental illness or other characteristics protected by law. Alexion provides reasonable accommodations to meet the needs of candidates and employees. To begin an interactive dialogue with Alexion regarding an accommodation, please contact accommodations@Alexion.com. Alexion participates in E-Verify.