Senior Director, Head of AI for Clinical Operations

AstraZeneca • Boston, MA

8d • Hybrid

About The Position

We're building a connected, end-to-end Enterprise AI engine - uniting data foundations, AI technology, process reinvention, and business-facing AI to accelerate results across the whole value chain. Success depends on being exceptional connectors: you'll actively leverage existing capabilities, celebrate and promote reuse, export breakthrough ideas across geographies and functions, and obsess over scaling impact rather than building in isolation. If you thrive in high-collaboration environments where your role is to turn complex, cross-functional problems into reusable, enterprise-wide capabilities - and where the measure of success is adoption and scale, not just innovation - you'll have the platform (and sponsorship) to make it real.

About AISI
AI Science & Innovation (AISI) sits at the centre of AstraZeneca's R&D AI transformation. Our remit is to build, buy and deliver the AI models and agents that change pipeline outcomes, across discovery, translational science, biomarkers and clinical development.

Role Overview
AstraZeneca is building a world-class AI capability for Clinical Development within AISI to accelerate the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical trials across our Oncology and BioPharmaceuticals pipeline. We are hiring the Head of AI for Clinical Operations to lead the science and the team that turns AI promise into real-world operational improvements in how AstraZeneca runs its trials. This is one of the highest impact challenges in AI for healthcare. Trials run for years, span thousands of clinicians and patients across dozens of countries, and generate streams of noisy, heterogeneous, regulated data. The playbook for AI in this environment will be developed in the next two to three years. You will advance the science of AI for trial execution and bring better treatments to patients, faster, while adhering to the highest evidentiary, GxP, and patient safety standards. We're hiring someone who sees this high bar as the reason to come, not a reason to hesitate. The AI for Clinical Development function is being built from the ground up, and you'll help define how AstraZeneca does AI for clinical operations. Expect an outsized voice with regulators, scientific consortia, and external partners during the narrow window when the rules of the road for agentic AI, AI/ML governance, and AI in trial conduct are being written. We hire for learning agility and technical excellence. The strongest candidate is the person who learns fast, is comfortable with ambiguity, prototypes early, fails forward, and partners credibly across communities (ML, clinical, biostatistics, regulatory). We’re seeking an engineer-leader with the leadership, technical depth, and curiosity to develop, adapt, and apply the most advanced methods in AI (e.g., agentic systems, multimodal foundation models, tool-use and orchestration, domain-specific evaluation environments) to clinical operations workflows, and who can sit across from clinical operations teams to translate their priorities into actionable, evaluable AI solutions. Above all, this is a role where the science matters. Every model you ship will eventually touch a trial, and a patient. That is the bar we hold ourselves to, and the bar we hire to.

Requirements

• MD (or equivalent clinical degree), MD-PhD, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Biomedical Sciences, Biomedical Informatics, or a closely related computational discipline, with a strong, hands-on computational track record.
• Minimum 8 years of combined experience across AI/ML method development and clinical research, clinical operations, or clinical development delivery with demonstrated impact on research enablement or live clinical deployment.
• Current, hands-on computational expertise: peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences and/or journals and shipped code in clinical AI, agentic systems, clinical NLP, or related areas.
• Comfort writing code, reviewing model implementations, and reproducing results.
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying agentic systems and LLM-based workflows in real clinical or healthcare environments, including agent harness design, tool-use scaffolding, multi-step orchestration, and LLM post-training methods.
• Strong experience in generative and non-generative AI benchmarking and evaluation across clinical and/or biomedical settings, including the construction of domain-specific evaluation environments for tasks with noisy or underspecified ground truth.
• Deep familiarity with modern AI methods relevant to trial operations: large language models, agentic systems, clinical NLP, multimodal models, generative AI, interpretability and oversight, and human-in-the-loop workflow AI.
• Working knowledge of clinical operations and trial conduct and the GxP, GCP, data-integrity, and validation expectations that apply to AI in live trials.
• Demonstrated track record of translating AI methods into applications that inform clinical decisions or trial execution, including prospective evaluation, deployment, or live-trial use.
• Demonstrated scientific leadership: mentoring scientists, leading multi-author projects, or running a small team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, able to translate technical findings for clinical, regulatory, and executive audiences.

Nice To Haves

• Direct industry experience in clinical operations, clinical trial technology, or digital trial delivery within a pharmaceutical, biotech, or CRO environment.
• Experience with deep-research, computer-use, or browsing benchmarks for clinical AI, and the construction of evaluation environments for them.
• Prior FDA, EMA, ICH, or other regulator engagement on AI in trial conduct, GCP for AI, data integrity standards for AI/ML, or evaluation and reporting standards for medical AI.
• First- or last-author publications at top ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CL) and/or top clinical and biomedical journals.
• Open-source contributions, workshop organisation, or standards-body participation.

Responsibilities

• Lead AstraZeneca's AI R&D for clinical operations across Oncology and BioPharmaceuticals — turning AI into measurable cycle-time, quality, and patient-experience outcomes in live trials.
• Lead a team of AI researchers and engineers to deliver AI for trial planning, conduct, monitoring, and reporting across the trial lifecycle.
• Partner closely with Clinical Operations to design and implement a strategy for AI-enabled operations.
• Develop and deploy agentic systems for high-leverage trial workflows (e.g., AI-assisted protocol authoring, eligibility screening and patient-trial matching, site selection, AE and SAE detection, query and data-review acceleration, source data verification, risk-based monitoring decision support).
• Build the AI for Clinical Development team's reusable evaluation environments for clinical agents so that every system shipped has a defensible measurement story.
• Oversee the standardization and harmonization of multimodal data for clinical operations AI, including EHR, clinical trial management systems, eTMF.
• Partner with Regulatory teams to develop AI-enabled trial-conduct standards and evidence that meet GxP, GCP, data-integrity, and emerging AI/ML regulatory expectations.
• Work closely with the Heads of AI for Early and Late Clinical Development on AI hand-offs from design through conduct, and contribute to the team's unified, reusable, and end-to-end strategies for AI method development, evaluation, monitoring, and oversight.
• Contribute the AI scientific and methodological voice on regulatory engagement for AI in trial conduct (GCP, agentic systems, data integrity).
• Represent AstraZeneca externally in industry forums, scientific consortia, and peer-reviewed venues.
• Serve as a thought partner for AISI and AI for Clinical Development leadership.
• Recruit, mentor, and lead a team of approximately four AI scientists and engineers as a player-coach who is hands-on with code, models, and trial-execution workflows while building a high-performing team that keeps up-to-date with the latest advances in frontier AI models and agents.

Benefits

• qualified retirement program [401(k) plan]
• paid vacation and holidays
• paid leaves
• health benefits including medical, prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree