director - principal engineer - data cloud

Within Pfizer Digital, the Customer & Commercial Creation Center (C4) group builds solutions for external customers throughout the product lifecycle​. We support stakeholders to engage external ​customers through digital solutions, whether that is patients, HCPs, payors, pharmacists, or clinical sites.

The Customer & Commercial Creation Center (C4) are thought partners and technical solution providers to commercial arms of the business (e.g., Pfizer’s ​sales force or marketers), working at the intersection of technology and healthcare.

Our Salesforce.com Platform DevSecOps & Engineering team focuses on Salesforce.com and surrounding enabling technologies as a strategic platform for Pfizer customer facing Colleagues, relationship management, and various business workflow or lifecycle applications.  We are an enterprise facing team that drives to provide the best DevSecOps, security, standards, and quality assurance processes and tooling that we can achieve for the organizations we serve, namely the production support/ops teams as well as solution delivery teams in various functional disciplines.

Our vision is to innovate and engineer breakthrough digital products to power business performance and transform global health. We do this through our culture of agile, fast-adapting and pioneer working.

What You Will Achieve

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Engineer who will be accountable for technical engineering decisions, solution designs, and delivery, as well as operations of their assigned program.

In this technical leadership role, you will act as the executor and the visionary behind technical solutions. You will lead teams of between 10 and 25 technical resources to solve complex engineering problems, craft the technical designs and ensure a successful delivery of high-quality products and services from inception to completion. This role requires exceptional technical knowledge, strong management skills, and the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams while sharing responsibility with the other program leads for achieving the desired objectives.

You will also be accountable for delivery of security-and privacy-first capabilities while creating an environment where engineers can do their best work as measured by a quarterly Developer’s Experience survey, and alignment and contribution to the service network and technical engineering standards.

Key Responsibilities:

• A normal work week consists of leading one or more teams of engineers to deliver and implement technical solutions, following your design approach to meet your assigned program objectives and KPIs. You will also collaborate closely and often with your program Chief Marketing Office Lead, Digital Lead, and Product Owners, to ensure that technical decisions and their implementation align with broader strategic priorities.

• You represent engineering in program and stakeholder meetings, as such you’ll need to be able to think on your feet: provide consultation, identify risks based on a variety of factors, and rely on your past experiences to identify potential solutions and develop ballpark estimates.

• In many situations you will be working with technology that is new to Pfizer and requires you to learn quickly, be able to read and understand documentation, and architect robust and scalable solutions that align with our business objectives.

• Using influence more than authority, you will lead teams of engineers on the implementation of the solution. Individual members of the team are responsible for delivering on their commitments, but the team supports each other. The team pride themselves on the quality of their code, our delivery practices and breadth of our test coverage. You will be expected to document your work.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as the top technical authority on projects, making decisions on technology choices, design approaches, solution architecture and implementation.

• Lead and oversee the entire lifecycle excellence of engineering projects, ensuring alignment with architectural vision and adherence to best practices.

• Responsible for maintaining good code quality by promoting and ensuring secure code hygiene

• Responsible for guiding the correct configuration of SaaS solutions to ensure security and compliance

• Build a teamable to manage change. Take appropriate risks to achieve the desired results, balancing risks to stability and current norms versus the need for constant change, improvement, and simplification.

• Facilitate the conversation between Enterprise Architects, Business Architects, Vendors and Developers, by providing technical clarity on solution(s) to build and code to write, move content from ideation into delivery to move from concept to reality.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Act as a translator between business stakeholders and technical engineers, to ensure that technical, security and privacy considerations are represented in strategic discussions and business objectives are being met by our solutions.

• Align objectives, dependencies, and schedules across multiple teams to keep teams unblocked, and to ensure seamless projects execution.

• Collaborate with other Principal Engineers, and through the Principal Engineers Forum, to share best practices, quality standards, address improvement areas, and ensure effective communication of information.

• Collaborate with security teams to monitor vulnerabilities, implement defenses, and ensure compliance with security best practices.

• Collaborate with digital operations and support to ensure smooth BAU operations.

Excellence by Design

• Continuously discover, define, architect, deliver, and enable solutions that support program OKRs.

• Offer deep technical expertise, providing insights and guidance, ensuring solutions are secure, compliant, scalable, maintainable, and efficient.

• Advocate for the adoption of best practices, new technologies, automation, and continuous improvement initiatives in both technical and privacy domains.

• Foster a DevOps model of success by building a culture of shared responsibilities and transparency leading to higher quality and quicker delivery of outcomes.

• Stay updated on emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices, and apply this knowledge to improve engineering processes and drive innovation within the organization.

• Ensure that privacy and security are an integral part of the system design, not merely layered on.

Coaching & Mentorship

• Participate in or lead code reviews, where applicable.

• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, facilitate knowledge sharing and taking an active role in supporting the development of the wider team and their careers. Foster a culture of excellence, innovation, and continuous learning within the engineering team.

• Act on Developer Experience (DX) survey findings and feedback from the engineering team members, to drive continuous improvement initiatives to increase the “Ease of Delivery” of the team.

Incident Management & Recovery

• Lead or assist in the response to security incidents, ensuring rapid containment, mitigation, and recovery.

• Lead troubleshooting during operational outages, guiding the team to diagnose and resolve issues quickly.

• Work towards system resilience and implement post-mortem analyses to identify root causes and prevent future incidents.

• Ensure that solutions are designed with data privacy considerations from the outset.

Required Skills & Knowledge

• Extensive experience in software engineering, with a focus on leading complex projects.

• Deep technical expertise from a well-documented background as a senior-level engineer.

• Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities, with a keen attention to detail.

• A broad technical knowledge of digital pharmaceutical sciences platforms and best practices across both user interfaces and back-end systems, as a “jack of all trades”.

• Proven technical leadership skills, mentorship, with the ability to motivate and inspire team members and fellow engineers towards achieving common goals.

• Exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to communicate effectively in a matrix environment with geographically distributed resources, and establish strong partnerships with senior non-technical stakeholders, with a talent to explain complex topics simply.

• Ability to influence and work with cross-functional teams to deliver complex projects in accordance with broader strategies.

• Deep understanding of software development methodologies and best practices for implementing principles of privacy & security ‘by design’.

• Understanding of the implications, regulations, and best practices of data handling in the pharmaceutical industry.

• Understanding of the DevSecOps best practices that should be in place, driving an “Everything as Code instead of paperwork” mentality.

• Familiarity with the multiple policies, standards, systems, and organizations within the pharmaceutical industry, to minimize risk of challenges or duplication in implementation.

Here Is What You Need (Minimum Requirements)

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field with 8 years’ experience with increasing responsibility delivering digital solutions, products, and services or Master’s degree and 7+ years of experience .

• Professional certifications in engineering leadership are a plus.

• Demonstrable experience operating in a DevOps environment.

• Proven capability handling large scale, enterprise software delivery in a global 24/7 environment.

• Demonstrated hands-on experience using Salesforce.com, Data Cloud, AgentForce, and TableauNext Semantic Layer in particular to build real-life large-scaled solutions.

• Salesforce Data Cloud experience a must

• Agentforce and TableauNext experience a plus

• Copado and SonarQube experience preferred

• Experience with Atlassian (Jira/Confluence)

• Experience driving and participating in technical discovery to architect and deliver solutions that meet program business objectives.

• Systems thinking experience demonstrated by architecting complex solutions that require integrating multiple solutions.

• Experience with multi-cloud architecture and deployments

• Experience working with remote teams and multi-cultural teams

• Experience in highly regulated and sensitive data handling scenarios preferred

• Experience with security and compliance audit processes preferred

• Understanding of CI/CD practices, RESTful APIs, integration patterns, microservice patterns and other areas of interest to modern software development.

• Excellent experience with Agile team processes, including Scrum and Kanban delivery - we enjoy working with lean methods.

• Excellent experience estimating complex technical stories and breaking them down.

• Strong written and spoken English with excellent asynchronous collaboration and communication.

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.