Director - Data Engineer

at  AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca is currently looking for a Director - Data Engineer to join our Data Science and Modeling Team in Biopharmaceutical Development. This will be a senior role within a team of data engineers / software developers for creating software tools for large scale deployment within our Accelerated Pharmaceutical Development Platform. We’ll rely on you to bring your extensive project and people leadership as well technical acumen to help the team continue to deliver world class solutions.
Our team is expanding and taking on a significant amount of responsibility. 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 can solve complex problems. Simply said, we seek to make an addition to the team that makes us better.
As a Principal/Director Data Engineer, in addition to your own contributions, you will play a leadership role within a team of data engineers to develop, document, deploy and support data systems and tools in addition to your own individual contributions to project in the DevOps pipeline. The team will collaborate with colleagues in AstraZeneca’s strategic sites in Gaithersburg, MD (USA) and Cambridge, UK to transition early-stage/proof-of-concept applications into large-scale-deployment ready applications for broad use across the Biopharmaceutical Development organization. Early-stage application development teams at the strategic sites work directly with scientists to develop an application to automate or manage a particular science or lab-based workflow. Proof of concept testing of this application leads to a decision that the application should be scaled-out to a broader user-base and/or for permanent deployment. This role will be responsible for collaborating with the originating team as well as partnering with colleagues in IT to fully test, document, remediate source code, create APIs and launch a production-ready application that meets all user requirements, and is fully compliant with IT and internal laboratory quality standards. The following skills and expertise will be needed by the successful candidate: ability to interact directly with customers to understand user requirements, advanced coding using best practices, ensuring proper code coverage, participating in peer code reviews and delivering & deploying the solution. You will be responsible for, along with IT colleagues, defining and managing standard infrastructure and developer tools such as dev, testing and production instances of cloud services as well as templates to provide a common starting point for new applications.

A combination of most or all of the following skills are essential for any successful candidate:

• Track record of software development project leadership
• Direct management or matrix leadership of a team of software developers or data engineers
• Experienced cloud application development and deployment
• Working knowledge / expertise of AWS application development with Lambda, IoT application and infrastructure development, Extract Transform Load (ETL) expertise.

A person in this role must also have additional technical skills, along with the ability and willingness to learn new skills and technologies in a fast-paced environment. Strong candidates for these roles will have many of these skills:

• Expertise in application development (Windows and Web) is a core requirement for this position. Proficiency with relevant programming languages such as VB.Net or C#
• Experience with REST APIs and general API design and usage
• Knowledgeable about MVC web application design, experience using .NET Core for MVC application development (HTML, JavaScript and C#)
• Thorough understanding of database architecture and experience in creating normalized databases
• Experience working with relational databases, understanding of NoSQL and graph databases.
• Developing automated solutions for the requirements that are generated by Software Leads and Project Managers.
• Ability to learn complex work flows that may deal with scientific data in large quantities.
• Ability to communicate system related information to stakeholders.
• Problem solving skills through research, brainstorming or group discussion.

EDUCATIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or Information Systems
Minimum 8 years of experience with PhD
Minimum 12 years’ experience with Masters
Minimum 15 years’ experience with Bachelors

• Expertise in application development (Windows and Web) is a core requirement for this position. Proficiency with relevant programming languages such as VB.Net or C#
• Experience with REST APIs and general API design and usage
• Knowledgeable about MVC web application design, experience using .NET Core for MVC application development (HTML, JavaScript and C#)
• Thorough understanding of database architecture and experience in creating normalized databases
• Experience working with relational databases, understanding of NoSQL and graph databases.
• Developing automated solutions for the requirements that are generated by Software Leads and Project Managers.
• Ability to learn complex work flows that may deal with scientific data in large quantities.
• Ability to communicate system related information to stakeholders.
• Problem solving skills through research, brainstorming or group discussion