Director, I&T Plasma Engineering

Principal Accountabilities

1. Engineering Standards & Practices

• Own and define the 'how we build' standards across all five Plasma digital product domains: coding standards, testing standards, security standards (in formal matrix partnership with the CSL Cyber organization), DevOps and CI/CD practices, and architectural patterns.
• Set the technical quality bar that all internal delivery teams, managed service providers, and external vendors are contractually and operationally held to.
• Enforce standards primarily through the shared engineering platform, automated quality gates, and review of significant technical designs.
• Review and approve significant technical designs personally, particularly those setting patterns others will follow.

2. Architecture Governance

• Set and enforce integration standards, data architecture, and cross-product technical decisions across the full Plasma digital ecosystem.
• Serve as the formal interface with the CSL Enterprise Architecture organization.
• Manage and develop the Plasma Business Architect.
• Own the target-state architecture for the Data Backbone.

3. Cross-Domain Team Leadership

• Provide direct people leadership for cross-domain enabling functions: Plasma Business Architect, QA Lead, QA Automation Engineers, AI/ML Product Engineer, Automation Engineer, Data Engineer, SRE/DevOps Engineer, and UX Designers.
• Own hiring standards, role design, career development frameworks, and succession planning for the cross-domain engineering team.
• Set and hold a culture of technical excellence, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
• Personally interview technical leads across the broader net-new hires.

4. Technology Platform Strategy

• Own the engineering tooling, platform, and capability roadmap — including the Data Backbone architecture, Middleware integration standards, cloud infrastructure direction, and the DevOps toolchain.
• Ensure the technology platform evolves in step with the Plasma product roadmap, anticipating capability needs 12–24 months ahead.
• Evaluate build vs. buy vs. partner decisions for platform capabilities; provide technology investment recommendations to senior leadership.
• Own the shared engineering platform that every Plasma product team builds on.

5. Technical Quality Oversight

• Review and approve technical approaches for significant architectural decisions across all Plasma digital products and vendor solutions.
• Serve as the escalation authority for technical quality issues.
• Establish metrics for technical health: code quality, test coverage, lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
• Update engineering quality gates as AI coding assistants generate an increasing share of code.

6. Artificial Intelligence Strategy & Governance

• Establish and execute an AI/Generative AI strategy for the engineering organization.
• Drive the adoption of AI-assisted software development practices.
• Partner with business stakeholders, data teams, enterprise architecture, and security teams to identify, prioritize, and deliver AI-enabled solutions.
• Ensure AI solutions are developed and deployed in accordance with enterprise governance, regulatory, privacy, data protection, and responsible AI standards.
• Own the operational discipline for AI in production across CSL Plasma.

7. Security & Compliance Standards

• Establish and own the formal matrix relationship with the CSL Cyber team for security and compliance standards.
• Ensure healthcare data protection, GDPR, and cloud security posture requirements are embedded in engineering standards.
• Oversee regulatory compliance engineering for applicable frameworks: 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, GxP, and EU Annex 11.
• Security controls are embedded in the shared engineering platform.

Required Skills & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field; Master's degree preferred.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles.
• Demonstrated success building and leading cross-functional engineering teams across multiple technical domains.
• Recent – within the last three years – hands-on engineering.
• Track record of setting engineering standards, patterns, and paved paths that were adopted across multiple product teams.
• Track record of shipping production AI systems, not pilots.
• Product engineering depth across native mobile, full-stack web, Salesforce platform, and API and integration development.
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture, integration platforms (MuleSoft, AWS, Azure), and cloud-native technology strategy.
• Demonstrated experience implementing, integrating, or leading initiatives involving Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and/or Generative AI technologies in an enterprise environment.
• Strong understanding of modern AI platforms, Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI evaluation, guardrails, and lifecycle management, agentic workflow patterns, and related cloud-native AI services.
• Strong experience establishing engineering governance: coding standards, architecture review processes, CI/CD pipelines, and technical quality metrics.
• Proven ability to define and enforce security and compliance engineering standards in partnership with Cyber and Legal organizations.
• Experience managing and developing senior technical staff including architects, QA leads, and specialist engineers.
• Excellent executive communication skills.
• Experience shipping software in a regulated or consumer-scale environment.
• Comfort working inside regulated context, including a willingness to build working knowledge of 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, GxP, and EU Annex 11.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Prior life sciences, healthcare, or pharmaceutical industry experience, or prior direct experience with 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, GxP, or EU Annex 11.
• Knowledge of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Informatica IDMC, and AWS/Azure enterprise integration patterns.
• Experience managing managed service providers and offshore engineering teams.
• AWS Solutions Architect (Professional), Certified Kubernetes Administrator, HashiCorp certifications, or equivalent architecture or platform-engineering credentials.
• Technically Credible.

Competencies

• Architectural Vision
• Standards Leadership
• Talent Developer
• AI & Digital Innovation Mindset
• Responsible Technology Leadership
• Trusted Advisor
• Governance with Judgment
• Security Champion