Associate Director, Data Engineering Lead
Novartis
Summary
Ready to build the foundation that powers trusted, AI-ready data at scale? As Associate Director, Data Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in shaping how enterprise data is engineered, governed, and delivered across Novartis. Working at the intersection of data platforms, governance, and innovation, you will establish the standards, controls, and engineering capabilities that enable reliable, compliant, and high-quality data products. This is an exciting opportunity to influence enterprise-wide data strategy, drive modern DataOps practices, and help accelerate data-driven decision making that ultimately supports better outcomes for patients worldwide.
Job description
Key Responsibilities
- Define and enforce enterprise standards for data engineering, pipeline reliability, and production controls.
- Design and oversee scalable, governed data pipelines supporting critical business and data domains.
- Lead the enterprise data contract lifecycle, including review, approval, governance, and enforcement.
- Implement data observability capabilities across monitoring, anomaly detection, service levels, and operational alerting.
- Establish controls that ensure critical data elements remain traceable, validated, and protected.
- Develop safeguards that prevent incomplete, inaccurate, or non-compliant data from reaching downstream systems.
- Partner with data modeling teams to align engineering implementation with approved enterprise data models.
- Collaborate across governance, privacy, architecture, and platform teams to enable compliant data delivery.
- Drive automation for deployment, validation, metadata capture, lineage generation, testing, and reporting.
- Monitor operational performance and lead resolution of pipeline, contract, and data reliability issues.
Essential Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Data Management, Engineering, Analytics, or a related field.
- 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data governance, data architecture, data product management, or enterprise data platform delivery.
- Experience designing, building, or governing enterprise data pipelines, data products, data platforms, or data integration capabilities.
- Direct experience with data contracts, schema validation, data pipeline monitoring, data observability, or data product certification.
- Experience working in complex enterprise environments with multiple data producers, consumers, vendors, platforms, and governance stakeholders.
Desirable Requirements
- Advanced degree or relevant cloud, data engineering, data management, or architecture certification.
- Experience supporting regulated, privacy-sensitive, or compliance-driven data environments.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Data Management, Engineering, Analytics, or a related field
- 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data governance, data architecture, data product management, or enterprise data platform delivery
- Experience designing, building, or governing enterprise data pipelines, data products, data platforms, or data integration capabilities
- Direct experience with data contracts, schema validation, data pipeline monitoring, data observability, or data product certification
- Experience working in complex enterprise environments with multiple data producers, consumers, vendors, platforms, and governance stakeholders
- Advanced degree or relevant cloud, data engineering, data management, or architecture certification (preferred)
- Experience supporting regulated, privacy-sensitive, or compliance-driven data environments (preferred)
Benefits
- Health Insurance
- Life Insurance
- Disability Benefits
- 401(k) Matching
- Vacation
- Personal Days
- Holidays
- Performance-Based Cash Incentive
- Annual Equity Awards
Company overview
Novartis is a global pharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, dedicated to reimagining medicine to improve and extend people's lives. As an innovative medicines company, Novartis focuses on developing high-value treatments that address society's greatest disease burdens through technology leadership in research and development. The company operates across five core therapeutic areas: cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases; immunology; neuroscience; oncology; and hematology. With a workforce of approximately 75,883 employees worldwide, Novartis reaches nearly 300 million patients across 118 countries. The company leverages advanced technology platforms including targeted protein degradation, cell therapy, gene therapy, radioligand therapy, and xRNA to develop breakthrough treatments. Novartis maintains a strong portfolio of oncology drugs and generics while continuously expanding its pipeline through strategic acquisitions and internal research. The company's commitment extends beyond drug development to ensuring global access to medical innovations through novel access approaches and patient assistance programs.