Senior Director, Real-World Data Operations Lead
About The Position
The Senior Director, RWD Operations Lead drives the strategy, execution, innovation, and continuous improvement of Lilly's real-world data ecosystem across therapeutic areas and enterprise data assets. This role ensures that RWD pipelines and processes are built, validated, and governed so that raw RWD are systematically evaluated, transformed, standardized, operationalized, and governed into reusable, AI-ready assets that accelerate evidence generation at scale. Equally this leader will translate the strategic direction and execution at the ground level, bringing deep, hands-on RWD expertise to ensure that scientific requirements are faithfully reflected in infrastructure design and data engineering decisions — bridging the gap between research intent and technical build. This includes oversight of the construction of analytic datasets, ensuring, in collaboration with HEOR and related functions, they are built to specification, reproducible, and fit for regulatory-grade and publication-quality evidence generation. This leader orchestrates cross-functional governance, establishes the logical rules and frameworks for appropriate data use, and extends the vision for RWD value beyond HEOR to maximize enterprise-wide impact. Responsibilities also include support of knowledge management including, but not limited to, ownership of code list and algorithm creation and maintenance, ensuring a single source of truth of resources and a repository for said information that enables high-quality, reproducible, and efficient evidence generation across Lilly's data portfolio. Critically, this role continuously scans for and incorporates emerging innovations — translating new capabilities into practical improvements that elevate the quality, speed, and scalability of Lilly's RWD operations. The role sits at the core of the RWD ARS transformation workstream, supporting future‑state team structure, operational governance, and execution excellence.
Requirements
- Masters degree (MS, MPH, PharmD, PhD) in a quantitative, data, or health‑related field.
- Minimum of 3 years of RWD hands on experience with: Healthcare data structures (claims, EHR, and multi‑modal RWD, including linked clinical‑genomic/omics datasets).
- Minimum of 3 years experience of RWD Healthcare coding systems: ICD‑10, CPT, NDC, LOINC, RxNorm.
Nice To Haves
- Experience driving alignment and conflict resolution across technical and scientific teams.
- Experience supporting organizational change and building operational frameworks.
- Demonstrated ability to manage complex operational workflows across multiple stakeholders.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills.
- Strong strategic thinker at enterprise level and ability to collaborate with RWD architect, engineer and strategy roles.
- Demonstrate leadership skills in influencing stakeholders to resolve conflicts
- Demonstrate leadership in establishing external partnership
- Proficiency in SQL, R, and R‑Shiny, including dashboarding and operational tool development.
- Familiarity with HEOR, medical, and statistical research workflows, including specification development, data quality assessment, study execution
- Minimum of 2 years of direct people management experience, including leading, coaching, and developing team members preferred.
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical and data integrity evaluation of raw RWD prior to acceptance and licensing, ensuring fitness‑for‑use, completeness, standardization, structure, and alignment with enterprise needs ensuring all documentation is sufficient and centralized.
- Collaborate closely with RWD architect(s) and engineer(s) to translate scientific needs and intent into enterprise RWD infrastructure strategy and specifications resolving pipeline bottlenecks and ensuring documentation meets operational standards (SAPs, data dictionaries, audit trails).
- Accelerate evidence generation by standardizing and transforming raw data into reusable, analysis‑ready assets across different business units.
- Develop, execute, document quality‑control frameworks that qualify data completeness and ensure consistent, reliable RWD operations at scale.
- Lead with forward-thinking mindset to incorporate strategic innovation (AI) into RWD ecosystem operations.
- Own end‑to‑end code list standardization, maintenance, stewardship, and hosting (e.g. ontology specifications, procedure codes, and medication codes incl. ICD‑10-CM, ICD-9, SNOMED-CT NDC, CPT/HCPC, LOINC, RxNorm).
- Lead development and maintenance of reusable phenotyping algorithms, code libraries, and standardized data pipelines and modular code to accelerate study startup.
- Establish governance and documentation standards for RWD asset reuse across functions.
- Lead operational governance for the use of RWD, including access pathways, approval flows, stewardship processes, and compliance with enterprise standards.
- Partner with different stakeholders to ensure operational readiness of datasets, tools, and processes.
- Support organizational change by clarifying new operational roles, interfaces, and future‑state workflows.
- Build tools and dashboards enabling stakeholders to gain rapid visibility into RWD sources – quality and density structures, limitations, and operational metadata.
- Collaborate with RWD Strategy Lead to ensure visibility into current RWD assets and pairing with RWD/RWE studies and queries to inform prioritization and resource planning for data acquisition.
- Operate with a research mindset to support building analytical, flexible TA-specific cohorts to support fast and consistent research
- Develop and deliver RWD‑source‑specific trainings to ensure scientific, technical, and operational teams understand the structure, quality, and limitations of each asset.
- Maintain and evolve documentation across pipelines, datasets, reusable components, and operational standards.
Benefits
- Relocation assistance is available for qualified candidates.
- company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance).
- company-sponsored 401(k)
- pension
- vacation benefits
- eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits
- flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts)
- life insurance and death benefits
- certain time off and leave of absence benefits
- well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
