Engineering Lead – Scientific Computing Platform

at  AstraZeneca

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 proud to have a unique workplace culture that inspires innovation and collaboration. Here, employees are empowered to express diverse perspectives and are made to feel valued, energised and rewarded for their ideas and creativity.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Line management of the platform engineering team
• Responsibility for technical direction and architecture decisions including compute, storage, networks and applications, actively steering evolution towards a true hybrid cloud platform
• Working with the platform leadership team to define the longer-term strategy and vision for HPC and cloud scientific computing capabilities, linked to key objectives of the wider organisation
• Driving harmonisation with enterprise strategies and frictionless integration into central infrastructure service offerings including data centres and public cloud services
• Be a champion for high-performance, tuning and optimization of scientific workflows and technology
• Create an outstanding team, beginning with recruiting, and then mentoring and developing team members. Lead by example, inspire and be a crucial part of individuals’ growth and retention
• Advocate and advance modern, agile development practices and help promote great engineering culture
• Contribute to the engineering team’s effort by writing code, solving advanced challenges, or fostering the incubation of innovative ideas and approaches
• Drive excellence in code quality and testing with unit, functional, integration tests, along with high-quality integrated documentation
• Stay up to date with the latest HPC & AI infrastructure trends and architectural patterns, driving an innovation mentality to ensure the platform stays at the forefront of technology

Candidate Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

• Bachelor’s, Masters or Doctorate degree in a quantitative or engineering field or equivalent work experience delivering innovative HPC and/or AI/ML solutions
• Proven track record in developing and operating HPC at scale.
• Demonstrated knowledge of HPC and relevant storage & network technologies
• A deep understanding of cloud technologies and engineering paradigms, especially AWS
• Strong passion for DevOps, cloud-native architecture, and infrastructure as code
• Experience cultivating the values, culture, and team topology conducive to impactful & empowered DevOps teams
• Background or interest in biology or medicine is a plus
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Excellent teamwork and collaboration skills

ABOUT THE ROLE?

The SCP Engineering Lead will both lead an agile engineering team and set the technical strategies to meet future scientific computing needs, where machine learning and AI are increasingly playing a major role in drug discovery at AstraZeneca.
We are seeking a highly motivated and dynamic engineering manager with a track record of delivering HPC systems, and fostering an inclusive empowered team culture where collaboration and engineering excellence thrive. You will bring a wealth of experience in the design and operation of scale-out scientific IT platforms and have the expertise to lead a globally distributed agile DevOps team.
Alongside the Scientific Computing Product lead, and with the support of a group of senior technical leads, the Engineering Lead will steer the technology roadmap to power AstraZeneca’s bold goals for advancing science and medicines. This includes platform objectives for HPC both on-premises and in the public cloud, using cloud-native engineering and full CI/CD, as well as working with scientists to supporting the research objectives of the wider R+D organisation.
Working closely with the wider team, the role will drive efforts to improve overall utilisation and efficiency. Through user training, communities of practice and in-depth collaboration, we engage with our user community and consider user experience an integral factor in the overall success and impact of the service offering.