Platform & Solution Engineering Lead

Overview

Lead the technical foundation, engineering capability and delivery pipelines for Pfizer's Digital Quality portfolio, which transforms Quality, Safety and Environmental Operations (QSEO), while keeping solutions compliant, secure and supportable.

What you'll do

• Own the strategy, engineering and lifecycle of the shared technical foundation for Digital Quality, including cloud footprint, runtime platforms, shared services, reusable components, developer tooling and non-production environments.
• Build the foundation as a product used by delivery teams across the portfolio, with defined service levels, roadmaps, adoption measures and a managed path for retiring legacy and duplicated technology.
• Provide engineering leadership and design accountability across SaaS, COTS and in-house solutions, ensuring engineering rigour, supportability and consistent quality regardless of delivery model.
• Prevent unmanaged customisation that undermines upgradability and cost of ownership.
• Own the integration and data engineering layer connecting Digital Quality solutions to each other and to the wider Pfizer landscape, including manufacturing, laboratory, enterprise resource planning and enterprise data platforms.
• Establish reusable integration patterns, interfaces and data contracts, and ensure integrations are resilient, monitored, documented and compliant with data integrity requirements.
• Define and run the engineering operating model covering source control, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, automated testing, security scanning, infrastructure as code, and environment and release management.
• Drive automation of validation and compliance evidence so that release frequency, deployment reliability and lead time improve without weakening GxP control.
• Own the release calendar and change governance across the portfolio, including coordination of platform vendor release cycles.
• Hold strategic technology vendors, systems integrators and managed service partners to account for engineering quality, delivery commitments, security posture and service performance.
• Shape sourcing strategy and the internal-versus-partner capability mix, define technical standards and acceptance criteria in statements of work, and manage capacity and demand across internal and external engineering teams.
• Act as the principal interface between Digital Quality and enterprise technology functions, ensuring DQ solutions adopt enterprise platforms, standards and services rather than building parallel capability.
• Influence enterprise roadmaps, standards and investment decisions on behalf of the QSEO domain, and represent Digital Quality in enterprise architecture, cyber security and technology governance forums.
• Lead, develop and grow a global engineering team of approximately 8–10 direct reports, alongside matrixed and contract resources.
• Build engineering capability, talent pipelines and succession plans; set technical performance expectations and career pathways; and foster a culture of engineering excellence, automation, innovation, accountability and continuous improvement.
• Ensure the technical foundation and all solutions built on it are maintained in a validated and compliant state in accordance with GRC guidelines, computerised system validation expectations, data integrity, data privacy and cyber security requirements.
• Maintain audit and inspection readiness for engineering processes and evidence, support internal audits and regulatory inspections, and balance pace of innovation with regulatory compliance.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree required in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or a related discipline.
• 10+ years of relevant experience in software or platform engineering, technical delivery leadership or engineering management, including accountability for engineering across a portfolio rather than a single application.
• 9+ years of relevant experience with an MS/MBA, or 7+ years with a PhD (as an alternative to the 10+ years above).
• Demonstrated experience leading, hiring and developing engineering teams at scale, including matrix leadership of vendor and contract resources across multiple geographies.
• Deep hands-on grounding in cloud platform engineering, integration architecture and modern software engineering practice.
• Practical experience of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing and security-in-the-pipeline.
• Experience delivering and operating across SaaS, COTS and custom-developed solutions, including vendor platform configuration, extension and upgrade management.
• Strong experience with Agile ways of working.
• Knowledge of financial management and procurement activities, with the ability to manage complex budgets, vendor contracts and internal-versus-partner capacity decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• SAFe experience.
• Experience in the pharmaceutical industry or another highly regulated manufacturing environment, including GxP computerised system validation, data integrity and inspection readiness.
• Experience automating validation and compliance evidence within CI/CD pipelines in a regulated context.
• Working knowledge of quality or EHS platforms and their integration landscape (for example Veeva, LIMS, Cority, Enablon).
• Experience engineering or operating AI and data capability in production, in partnership with architecture and data functions.
• Demonstrated success leading technology rationalisation, platform consolidation or large-scale migration programmes.
• Recognised cloud or architecture certification.

Details

• Location: India - Chennai.
• Work mode: Hybrid.
• Travel: occasional, up to 20%.
• Availability: ability to work virtually across regions and time zones, including occasional out-of-hours working to support deployment go-lives and hypercare.
• Reports into Pfizer Digital, PGS, Enabling Functions & Enterprise Platforms - Quality Solutions Lead.
• Financial accountability of approximately $10M annually across platform, cloud consumption, engineering services and managed service investment.