Associate Director – Operations Business Partner

Certara

About The Position

Certara accelerates the potential of bringing medicines to market and to patients using biosimulation software, technology, and services to transform traditional drug discovery and development. Our clients include more than 2,400 biopharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and regulatory agencies across 70 countries. Our goal is to enable the life sciences industry’s use of data, modeling, and analytics to make better decisions across the various phases of discovery and drug development. Our software and scientists incorporate modern advances in scientific understanding, drug development experience, data analysis, and AI resulting in significant opportunities to decrease the cost and increase the probability of success for new drug approval and commercialization. This critically impactful operations role will serve as the operational partner to a consulting practice leader. This role ensures effective execution of operational processes within the practice, drives performance across the project portfolio, manages resource planning and demand, and facilitates operational governance, reporting, and risk management. Further, this role will take on operational leadership responsibilities for transformative and strategic initiatives within the practices to drive incremental revenue, profitability or efficiency, as appropriate.

Requirements

Serve as the primary operational partner to practice and service line leaders, ensuring effective execution of day-to-day operations and alignment with divisional priorities.
Participate as a member of the Practice Area leadership team, acting as a conduit between the Practice Area and the Business Operations group to facilitate timely information flow, operational alignment, and informed decision-making. Provide operational activity management and practice performance oversight through a structured business partnership model.
Monitor financial and operational performance at the practice and service line levels, delivering insights that drive improved revenue, margin, and delivery efficiency.
Provide targeted operational reporting and partner with Strategic Operations & Insights on standardized dashboards and metrics and the practice, service line and team level.
Analyze project and portfolio performance—including profitability, utilization, and delivery quality—to identify trends, risks, and improvement opportunities. Coordinate with project managers and project leads to ensure project performance and revenue expectations are met.
Oversee project health across the practice; collaborate with project managers and project leads to address risks, delivery issues, and margin drivers.
Guide resource planning processes in collaboration with dedicated resource managers, project management, business development, and service line leadership.
Monitor capacity, utilization, supply/demand alignment, and forecast accuracy; escalate constraints or risks proactively.
Support staffing decisions for new and ongoing engagements, ensuring transparency on priorities and resourcing tradeoffs.
Act as a liaison between practice teams and enterprise operations (Strategic Ops & Insights, Quality, Business Ops, PMO, BD, ).
Drive adoption of enterprise processes, tools, and standards within the practice.
Ensure adherence to internal controls, including timesheet compliance, training requirements, SOPs, and quality management expectations.
Manage internal governance processes (e.g. project pricing reviews, work at risk, project cost management, etc.)
Lead or support strategic initiatives within practices, including new service development; conduct business case development for new offerings or operational investments.
Partner with cross-functional teams on operational excellence, process optimization, and technology enablement (PSA, CRM, analytics, automation, etc.).
Execute strategically important activities that advance practice and service line goals.

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary operational partner to practice and service line leaders, ensuring effective execution of day-to-day operations and alignment with divisional priorities.
Participate as a member of the Practice Area leadership team, acting as a conduit between the Practice Area and the Business Operations group to facilitate timely information flow, operational alignment, and informed decision-making. Provide operational activity management and practice performance oversight through a structured business partnership model.
Monitor financial and operational performance at the practice and service line levels, delivering insights that drive improved revenue, margin, and delivery efficiency.
Provide targeted operational reporting and partner with Strategic Operations & Insights on standardized dashboards and metrics and the practice, service line and team level.
Analyze project and portfolio performance—including profitability, utilization, and delivery quality—to identify trends, risks, and improvement opportunities. Coordinate with project managers and project leads to ensure project performance and revenue expectations are met.
Oversee project health across the practice; collaborate with project managers and project leads to address risks, delivery issues, and margin drivers.
Guide resource planning processes in collaboration with dedicated resource managers, project management, business development, and service line leadership.
Monitor capacity, utilization, supply/demand alignment, and forecast accuracy; escalate constraints or risks proactively.
Support staffing decisions for new and ongoing engagements, ensuring transparency on priorities and resourcing tradeoffs.
Act as a liaison between practice teams and enterprise operations (Strategic Ops & Insights, Quality, Business Ops, PMO, BD, ).
Drive adoption of enterprise processes, tools, and standards within the practice.
Ensure adherence to internal controls, including timesheet compliance, training requirements, SOPs, and quality management expectations.
Manage internal governance processes (e.g. project pricing reviews, work at risk, project cost management, etc.)
Lead or support strategic initiatives within practices, including new service development; conduct business case development for new offerings or operational investments.
Partner with cross-functional teams on operational excellence, process optimization, and technology enablement (PSA, CRM, analytics, automation, etc.).
Execute strategically important activities that advance practice and service line goals.