Senior Director, Engineering

Pfizer • Collegeville, PA

1d • $214,900 - $358,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

This role owns the engineering build accountability for the Medical Affairs Digital and AI portfolio. This role leads the team that turns solution architecture and product requirements into shipped, production-grade AI systems at enterprise scale. It carries direct people-leadership accountability for a build team of three Build Engineers and a Data Integration Engineer, and hands-on technical accountability for engineering standards, delivery velocity, and production reliability across Medical Affairs globally.
This is a peer role to the Senior Director, Solution Architecture and the Senior Director, Product Management — and works closely together with these peers to deliver enterprise scale solutions -- product management defines what gets built and why, architecture defines how a solution is built and engineering builds and ships it. This role drives engineering standards, build quality, and delivery discipline that ensures reliability and speed for every AI system deployed to production.
The Senior Director operates with significant technical and managerial autonomy, translating architecture blueprints and product roadmaps into committed delivery plans, and is accountable for realistic delivery commitments, production reliability, and engineering risk — including the technical debt, security, and compliance consequences of build decisions.
The Senior Director, Engineering leads and builds the engineering organization responsible for constructing, integrating, and shipping Medical Affairs' AI-powered products and platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role owning software engineering practice, data integration execution, CI/CD and LLMOps/MLOps discipline, and production reliability for the portfolio of Medical Affairs Tier 1 Agentic AI and LLM-based systems. Reporting into the lead of Medical AI Acceleration and Delivery and partnering with peer Senior Directors of Solution Architecture and Product Management, this leader turns architecture and product intent into working, tested, deployed software — while building, coaching, and retaining an engineering team capable of operating at enterprise AI scale.

Requirements

• Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; 12+ years of progressive software/data engineering experience, including 4-5+ years in an engineering leadership or management role.
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping production AI/ML or LLM-based systems at enterprise scale.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud architecture (AWS or Azure), API-first design, and CI/CD/DevOps practice.
• Hands-on experience with LLMOps/MLOps tooling, vector databases, RAG pipeline engineering, and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience with data integration engineering and pipeline development across enterprise systems.
• Proven people-management experience, including hiring, coaching, and performance management of engineering talent.
• Experience partnering with Solution Architects and Product Managers/Owners in a matrixed delivery model.
• Experience with Agile/Scrum delivery frameworks.
• Must be able to travel to Pfizer offices, vendor offices, and other team meeting locations when required.
• Project work can sometimes be demanding and require work during off-hours to coordinate with global stakeholders or respond to production incidents.
• Candidates must be authorized to be employed in the U.S. by any employer.
• U.S. work visa sponsorship (such as TN, O-1, H-1B, etc.) is not available for this role now or in the future.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in a technical field.
• Experience in pharmaceutical, life sciences, or another regulated industry, with familiarity with GxP, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance requirements for engineered systems.
• Familiarity with Veeva CRM, Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration patterns.
• Relevant certifications (AWS/Azure Solutions Architect or Developer, Certified Scrum Master or equivalent for engineering leaders).

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end engineering delivery for the Medical AI Acceleration portfolio, translating solution architecture and product requirements into working, production-grade software.
• Set engineering standards, coding practices, and technical quality bars across the build team, ensuring consistency, maintainability, and reuse across products.
• Establish and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines, environment strategy, and release management practice across AI/ML and traditional software components.
• Own sprint and iteration execution in partnership with the Scrum Master, ensuring committed work is delivered on time and to standard.
• Direct the build of Agentic AI systems, LLM integrations, and RAG pipelines, translating architectural design into deployed, functioning services.
• Oversee data integration engineering across core enterprise systems (e.g., Veeva CRM, PromoMats, Salesforce Life Sciences/Marketing Cloud), ensuring reliable, well-governed data pipelines feed AI and analytics platforms.
• Implement and maintain LLMOps/MLOps practice — model deployment pipelines, monitoring, retraining triggers, and performance measurement — in partnership with Solution Architecture.
• Ensure engineering-level enforcement of responsible AI safeguards (data access controls, prompt injection defenses, model output monitoring) defined by the architecture function.
• Own production reliability, uptime, and incident response for the Medical AI Acceleration portfolio's shipped systems.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Solution Architecture to ensure engineering practice meets regulatory requirements (GxP, HIPAA, GDPR) and passes required technical gates before release.
• Identify and remediate technical debt, balancing delivery speed against long-term system health.
• Partner as a peer with the Senior Director, Solution Architecture to review and co-author architecture blueprints prior to finalization, to ensure architecture blueprints are buildable, and with the Senior Director, Product Management to ensure delivery sequencing reflects business priority.
• Partner as a peer with the Senior Director, Solution Architecture to define and review RFIs, RFPs and perform vendor selection.
• Represent engineering capacity, velocity, and risk in portfolio governance forums, providing realistic delivery commitments to senior stakeholders.
• Collaborate with the AI Experience and Workflow Design lead to ensure interface and workflow designs are engineered faithfully to specification.
• Serve as the Medical Affairs Engineering interface to the Digital Technology platform teams. Educate Medical Affairs colleagues in the Federated Model on the use of the centrally deployed platforms.
• Directly manage, coach, and develop three Build Engineers and one Data Integration Engineer, setting objectives, conducting performance management, and building career growth paths.
• Build a high-performing, AI-native engineering culture — hiring, onboarding, and upskilling engineers in modern AI/ML build practice.
• Establish engineering community-of-practice norms (code review, pairing, documentation) that scale beyond the immediate team.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution
• paid vacation, holiday and personal days
• paid caregiver/parental and medical leave
• health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior