Human Bio-Samples Platform Director

ABOUT ASTRAZENECA

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven BioPharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the world’s most serious diseases. But we’re more than one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

At AstraZeneca, we 're dedicated to being a Great Place to Work. Where you are empowered to push the boundaries of science and unleash your ambitious spirit. There’s no better place to make a difference to medicine, patients and society. An inclusive culture that champions diversity and collaboration. Always committed to lifelong learning, growth and development.

ABOUT OUR IT TEAM

In Early Science, we have highly skilled scientists in our labs who experiment and support complex drug projects. The environment is driven by scientific and technical innovation with a high level of diversity in workflows, data and vendors.

Our vision, in collaboration with early R&D scientists, is to build an IT environment that digitises the experimental process and makes experimental data more available and re-usable. To accelerate research timelines, increase efficiency and quality, our teams enable the scientist and lab of the future where the journey of an experiment from start to finish is frictionless and thoughtfully automated. We ensure seamless access to FAIR experimental data, empowering the scientists to build new insights and accelerate decision-making.

ABOUT THE ROLE

AstraZeneca is currently looking for a Human Bio-samples Platform Director to join our R&D IT Solution Delivery Team. This role requires a leader with deep technical skills, that has experience with large coordinated systems, and capable of managing others. We’ll rely on you to bring your technical acumen to help the team continue to deliver world class solutions for both our employees and our external constituents such as patients and doctors.

We thrive on having teammates who are a pleasure to work with. To us, this means having humility, taking accountability for your work and your team, feeling the need to continually raise the expectations of yourself and others, and lastly being a true engineer who is capable of solving complex problems.

In this role you will be part of our global engineering team. Your team will be yours to build and is currently leveraging external support. You will be able to select a majority of the team members. You will be encouraged to work with and manage team members in multiple locations around the world.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

We consider individuals in this role to be one of our top tier Engineers. This means you will likely be the most experienced and skilled engineers on your team, at least to begin with. You and your team will be encouraged to deliver high quality solutions which are balanced as you build and own it.

This platform is a mix of both custom applications and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS). It is encouraged that you will be able to lead a team that can both handle the configuration, integration, and improvement of the COTS product, and the custom applications within the space. As this platform covers our Human Bio-Samples, it can benefit from domain knowledge related to bio-bank management, integrations, and process workflow as well.

It is not critical that you have extensive experience in our entire tech stack. A top tier engineer is capable of working in multiple spaces and learning new technology is part of that. However, you must have deep technical skills and an extensive history of writing code. It is not required that you have skills in all of these technologies, however these are some of the technologies that we use:

• Azenta Bio Bank
• Spring / Java
• Node / NPM
• Responsive Web / HTML5
• React / TypeScript / JavaScript
• CSS
• Activiti / Camunda / Flowable
• AWS - cloud hosting and cloud orchestration
• Couchbase / MongoDB / Other NoSQL technologies
• PostgreSQL
• Elastic Search
• Mule API Gateway / REST APIs
• Jira / Confluence / GIT

JOB REQUIREMENTS:

• Bachelor’s degree
• 10+ combined years of hands on IT experience (Software Development, Architecture, Business Analyst, Engineering, etc.)
• 5+ years of leadership responsibilities on software delivery projects
• You have life sciences experience, particularly within Research & Development Labs
• You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development and building capabilities that deliver value and a great user experience
• You know what good looks like for a hard-working team of engineers and know how to get there
• You are confident in leading Engineers on standard methodologies on key architectural concepts as needed and are comfortable to have trade off conversations around technical debt
• You are highly skilled in modern DevOps culture/practices with proven experience of migration to Cloud based environments
• You have experience of delivering within a regulated environment

WHY JOIN US:

Join us at a crucial stage of our journey in becoming a digital and data-led enterprise. Make the impossible possible by building partnerships and ecosystems, creating new ways of working and driving scale and speed to deliver exponential growth. Focused and committed, and backed with the investment to succeed, we’re driving cross-company change to disrupt the entire industry.

SO, WHAT'S NEXT?

Are you up for an exciting challenge and ready for making a difference? If so, hit Apply today - we can't wait to hear from you!