Associate Director, Data Quality Lead
Novartis
Summary
Help shape the foundation of trusted, AI-ready data that powers critical business decisions across Novartis. As Associate Director, Data Quality, you will play a pivotal role in building and advancing enterprise data quality practices that ensure our most important data assets are accurate, reliable, and fit for purpose. Working across Data Governance, Data Engineering, Data Product teams, and business stakeholders, you will drive measurable improvements in data trust, lead enterprise-wide quality initiatives, and help unlock the full value of data for analytics, innovation, regulatory excellence, and artificial intelligence.
Job description
Key Responsibilities
- Define and advance enterprise data quality standards, frameworks, policies, and measurement practices.
- Establish scalable quality rules, thresholds, scorecards, dashboards, and reusable control frameworks.
- Partner with stakeholders to translate business needs into measurable data quality requirements.
- Embed data quality controls throughout the data product lifecycle and certification process.
- Lead enterprise monitoring, reporting, and performance tracking for critical data assets.
- Drive data quality issue triage, root cause analysis, escalation, and resolution activities.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to automate quality checks and data observability capabilities.
- Support AI-ready data initiatives by ensuring trusted, governed, and high-quality datasets.
- Maintain documentation, remediation plans, operational trackers, and control evidence.
- Foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and confidence in enterprise data.
Essential Requirements
- 8+ years in data quality, including 3+ years leading teams in a regulated industry (pharma/life sciences strongly preferred).
- Strong understanding of data quality dimensions, data profiling, data validation, data cleansing, root cause analysis, and remediation.
- Knowledge of data governance frameworks, data stewardship, critical data elements, metadata, lineage, and data product certification.
- Familiarity with data quality tools, data observability platforms, SQL, data catalogs, workflow tools, and reporting dashboards.
- Understanding of data engineering concepts, including data pipelines, ingestion, transformation, controls, monitoring, and production support.
- Ability to define measurable data quality rules and translate business requirements into technical requirements.
- Knowledge of AI-ready data concepts, including trusted datasets, lineage, quality thresholds, and governed usage.
Requirements
- 8+ years in data quality
- 3+ years leading teams in a regulated industry
- Strong understanding of data quality dimensions, data profiling, data validation, data cleansing, root cause analysis, and remediation
- Knowledge of data governance frameworks, data stewardship, critical data elements, metadata, lineage, and data product certification
- Familiarity with data quality tools, data observability platforms, SQL, data catalogs, workflow tools, and reporting dashboards
- Understanding of data engineering concepts, including data pipelines, ingestion, transformation, controls, monitoring, and production support
- Ability to define measurable data quality rules and translate business requirements into technical requirements
- Knowledge of AI-ready data concepts, including trusted datasets, lineage, quality thresholds, and governed usage
Benefits
- Health benefits
- Life insurance
- Disability benefits
- 401(k) with company contribution and match
- 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.