Director, Laboratory Automation

This leader will drive the transformation from automated workflows to highly integrated, digitally connected, hands-free laboratory operations that accelerate development timelines, increase capacity, improve quality, reduce errors and enhance scientific decision-making through agentic, closed-loop learning. The successful candidate will provide strategic leadership for assay automation, robotics integration, orchestration, digitalization, automated and agentic automation workflows, and next-generation automation technologies.

This role will partner closely with Scientific Development, Process Development, Data Science, Digital & Technology, Engineering & Property Services, Supply Chain, Safety and external technology partners to design, deploy, and scale innovative autonomous laboratory solutions across the global development network. The Director will be responsible for developing long-term automation roadmaps, building scalable, organizational capabilities, and ensuring automation platforms are reliable, robust and support both current business needs and future autonomous laboratory capabilities.

Strategic Leadership

• Developing and executing the long-term laboratory automation and robotics strategy across development laboratories.
• Establishing multi-year automation roadmaps aligned with organizational priorities and future-state digital laboratory ambitions.
• Driving the adoption of innovative automation, robotics, AI-enabled automated equipment control, and next generation laboratory orchestration technologies.
• Identifying opportunities to accelerate learning, increase capacity, reduce cycle time, improve quality, and decrease manual laboratory operations.

Technical Leadership

• Leading the design, development, deployment, and lifecycle management of integrated laboratory automation systems.
• Overseeing implementation of end-to-end automated and orchestrated workflows across multiple platforms including semantics and automation ontology.
• Driving architecture decisions for liquid handling, robotics, laboratory scheduling systems, laboratory orchestration platforms, and agentic and automated data systems.
• Leading evaluation, selection, and implementation of new automation technologies and strategic vendor partnerships.
• Ensuring robust technical governance, standardization, and scalability across automation platforms.
• Lead strategy for diagnosis and resolution of complex, cross-platform automation failures spanning equipment, software, networks, infrastructure and enterprise technology environments.
• Establish resilient automation architectures incorporating system monitoring, centralized logging, configuration management, cybersecurity, backup/recovery, change control and business continuity.

Organizational Leadership

• Building and leading a high-performing organization of automation leaders, automation engineers, software engineers, robotics specialists, and laboratory scientists.
• Developing talent and succession plans while fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Providing leadership across multiple functional teams and matrix organizations.
• Supporting capability development strategies to ensure long-term organizational competitiveness.

Digital & Data Integration

• Partnering with Digital & Technology, and Data Science teams to establish connected laboratory ecosystems.
• Driving integration between laboratory automation systems, LIMS, ELN, MES, data lakes, analytics platforms, and AI-enabled solutions.
• Enabling automated data capture, contextualization, visualization, and scientific insight generation.
• Supporting development of autonomous and self-optimizing laboratory capabilities.

Compliance & Quality

• Ensuring laboratory automation systems comply with safety and regulatory requirements.