Associate Director, Data Engineering Lead
About The Position
The Associate Director, Data Engineering Lead will shape how enterprise data is engineered, governed, and delivered across Novartis. The role works across data platforms, governance, and innovation to establish standards, controls, and engineering capabilities that enable reliable, compliant, high-quality, and AI-ready data products. It will influence enterprise-wide data strategy, advance modern DataOps practices, and support data-driven decision-making. The preferred work location is the East Hanover, New Jersey site. Remote work may be possible, subject to legal-entity restrictions. Relocation support is not available. For remote employees, home-office expenses and travel or lodging for periodic live meetings at the East Hanover site are at the employee’s expense. Working hours and travel expectations will be defined by the hiring manager. The company will not sponsor visas for this position.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Data Management, Engineering, Analytics, or a related field.
- At least 5 years of experience in data engineering, data governance, data architecture, data product management, or enterprise data platform delivery.
- Experience designing, building, or governing enterprise data pipelines, data products, data platforms, or data integration capabilities.
- Direct experience with data contracts, schema validation, data pipeline monitoring, data observability, or data product certification.
- Experience working in complex enterprise environments with multiple data producers, consumers, vendors, platforms, and governance stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Advanced degree or relevant cloud, data engineering, data management, or architecture certification.
- Experience supporting regulated, privacy-sensitive, or compliance-driven data environments.
Responsibilities
- Define and enforce enterprise standards for data engineering, pipeline reliability, and production controls.
- Design and oversee scalable, governed data pipelines supporting critical business and data domains.
- Lead the enterprise data contract lifecycle, including review, approval, governance, and enforcement.
- Implement data observability capabilities for monitoring, anomaly detection, service levels, and operational alerting.
- Establish controls to ensure critical data elements remain traceable, validated, and protected.
- Develop safeguards to prevent incomplete, inaccurate, or non-compliant data from reaching downstream systems.
- Partner with data modeling teams to align engineering implementation with approved enterprise data models.
- Collaborate with governance, privacy, architecture, and platform teams to enable compliant data delivery.
- Drive automation for deployment, validation, metadata capture, lineage generation, testing, and reporting.
- Monitor operational performance and lead resolution of pipeline, contract, and data reliability issues.
Benefits
- Performance-based cash incentive.
- Depending on role level, eligibility to be considered for annual equity awards.
- Health, life, and disability benefits for eligible US-based employees.
- 401(k) with company contribution and match.
- Vacation, personal days, holidays, and other leaves.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
