Director, Automation Enablement

Role overview

The Director, Automation Enablement will lead a customer-facing function that translates laboratory automation needs into repeatable solutions and scalable capabilities. Working directly with customers, this leader will understand scientific workflows, identify operational problems, and determine where automation can deliver meaningful value. They will qualify opportunities and select the appropriate approach through existing products, reusable capabilities, services, external partners, or local delivery resources. The Director will connect customer learning with field execution, partner delivery, product roadmaps, and investment decisions. The role will advance connected laboratory workflows across instruments, liquid handling, robotics, software, data, and AI while reducing the effort required to deliver successful solutions.

Key responsibilities

Customer discovery and experience

• Build trusted relationships with customer executives, laboratory leaders, scientists, and automation and informatics stakeholders.
• Map scientific workflows, desired outcomes, operational constraints, readiness, and integration dependencies.
• Identify manual handoffs, fragmented data, usability challenges, and barriers to adoption.
• Translate customer requests into validated problem statements, value hypotheses, scope, and measurable success criteria.
• Use customer journey insights to improve discovery, solution evaluation, deployment, and sustained use.

Opportunity qualification and prioritization

• Own intake, qualification, and prioritization of automation enablement opportunities.
• Evaluate customer impact, strategic relevance, repeatability, feasibility, risk, commercial potential, and available capacity.
• Establish scope, sponsors, decision rights, delivery responsibilities, and escalation paths before committing resources.
• Make explicit build, configure, partner, or reuse decisions with relevant stakeholders.
• Redirect, defer, or stop requests better addressed through existing products, services, partners, or local resources.

Delivery accountability

• Set priorities, objectives, and resource allocation for the Automation Enablement function.
• Lead and develop the solution architects, automation, data and AI specialists
• Own quality, milestones, risks, stakeholder communication, and escalation for accepted engagements.
• Coordinate contributions from Product, Engineering, Applications, Commercial, Service, partners, and Last-Mile Integration resources.
• Address applicable safety, quality, security, data integrity, and regulatory considerations with accountable specialists.
• Capture delivery lessons and apply them to subsequent engagements.

Reusable capabilities and scale

• Convert customer learning into reference architectures, integration patterns, playbooks, deployment methods, and enablement assets.
• Identify recurring needs that warrant reusable capabilities or formal product development.
• Reduce customer-specific engineering through standard interfaces, configurable approaches, and proven integrations.
• Establish clear ownership, documentation, maintenance, and support arrangements for reusable assets.
• Use AI, automation, and appropriate simulation tools to accelerate discovery, configuration, testing, and delivery.

Field and partner enablement

• Equip Sales, Field, Support, and Service teams with guides, qualification criteria, reference solutions, and escalation routes.
• Work with Ecosystem & Partnerships leaders to extend capacity through qualified integrators, automation vendors, and managed-services providers.
• Define partner readiness and delivery expectations with technical and functional stakeholders.
• Track adoption of reusable approaches and remove barriers to consistent use across regions.
• Support effective customer handoffs and continuity between solution development, implementation, and support.

Product and investment influence

• Synthesize customer evidence into recommendations for product roadmaps, platform priorities, service offerings, and investment.
• Distinguish broadly recurring needs from one-off requirements.
• Provide Product Management with validated use cases, value evidence, integration requirements, and adoption barriers.
• Contribute customer evidence to business cases and commercialization decisions.
• Maintain feedback loops with Product, Engineering, Commercial, and Service teams

Measures of success

• Quality and speed of customer discovery and opportunity qualification.
• Demonstrated customer productivity gains and faster time to value.
• Predictable delivery quality and stakeholder confidence.
• Increased reuse of reference architectures, integrations, methods, and enablement assets.
• Reduced effort required to deliver subsequent engagements.
• Adoption of proven approaches by regional teams, services, and partners.
• Customer evidence incorporated into roadmaps and investment decisions.
• Effective team development and use of available capacity.

Qualifications

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, science, computer science, business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Twelve or more years of experience in laboratory automation, scientific software or informatics, systems integration, technical services, enterprise automation, or a closely related field.
• Five or more years leading people or major cross-functional, multi-region programs with clear accountability for outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to move from stated customer requests to validated problems, value, scope, and success criteria.
• Technical judgment across instruments, automation, robotics, software, data, and integration.
• Experience prioritizing competing opportunities and establishing delivery discipline.
• Strong executive communication and influence across organizational boundaries.

Preferred qualifications

• Advanced degree or experience in life sciences, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, chemical analysis, or regulated laboratory environments.
• A record of converting custom engagements, pilots, or co-development into reusable offerings, architecture, methods, or products.
• Experience with automation vendors, robotics partners, systems integrators, managed services, or distributed delivery teams.