Senior Director, Corporate Strategy (San Diego / Hybrid)
Illumina
Summary
The Senior Director, Corporate Strategy is a senior member of the Enterprise Strategy team who leads some of Illumina's most consequential enterprise strategy efforts and serves as a trusted strategic advisor to senior executives. The role helps define Illumina's long-term direction and strategic priorities, converts ambiguous leadership questions into clearly framed decisions, builds the fact base needed to evaluate alternatives, and develops recommendations that make major choices and trade-offs explicit.
Job description
Essential Functions
- Lead enterprise strategy development. Help define and evolve Illumina's long-term direction and enterprise strategic priorities.
- Frame ambiguous executive decisions. Convert broad or unclear leadership concerns into defined decisions, meaningful alternatives, decision criteria, and focused analytical workplans.
- Lead high-priority strategic initiatives. Independently lead cross-enterprise strategy efforts sponsored by the CEO, Executive Team, or Vice President, Enterprise Strategy.
- Build a trusted enterprise fact base. Integrate market models, customer insight, competitive intelligence, scientific and technology perspectives, internal performance, and financial analysis.
- Develop alternatives and make trade-offs explicit. Create credible strategic options rather than presenting a single predetermined answer.
- Integrate enterprise perspectives. Draw on relevant functional and regional expertise while preserving an independent enterprise point of view.
- Advise senior leadership. Develop concise, decision-ready materials for the Executive Team and Board.
- Develop strategy talent and institutional capability. Lead and coach multi-level project teams, including Directors, Associate Directors, and other contributors.
- Support decision follow-through. Translate strategic decisions into clear implications, owners, milestones, and measures of value.
Key Competencies
- Enterprise strategy judgment: Connects industry change, customer needs, scientific and technology developments, competitive dynamics, economics, and internal capabilities to enterprise-level choices.
- Structured problem solving under ambiguity: Finds the decision within an unclear concern, develops testable hypotheses and novel frameworks, and identifies questions not initially asked.
- Analytical and financial rigor: Builds and interrogates market, business-case, scenario, and value-creation analyses; distinguishes facts, assumptions, and organizational beliefs.
- Executive synthesis and communication: Turns complex analysis into a compelling decision narrative, facilitates senior discussions, and communicates effectively with the ELT and Board.
- Constructive challenge and influence: Builds trust while challenging established assumptions, surfaces real disagreement, and influences across a matrix without relying on formal authority.
- Scientific and technology fluency: Learns complex science- and technology-driven markets rapidly and translates technical developments into commercial and strategic implications without needing to be a practicing scientist.
- Talent and team leadership: Creates high standards, coaches experienced strategists, develops future strategy leaders, and builds inclusive, high-performing teams.
- Judgment and working style: Demonstrates intellectual curiosity, pragmatism, sound judgment, resilience, and low-ego collaboration in high-stakes settings.
Supervisory Responsibilities
This is a people-leader role. The Senior Director manages and develops senior strategy professionals and leads multi-level, cross-functional project teams. Responsibilities include setting direction and quality standards, allocating work, providing timely feedback and coaching, supporting career development, and building a strong bench of strategy leaders.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in business, economics, finance, engineering, life sciences, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Prior background in a top consulting firm.
- 10+ years in corporate strategy, top-tier strategy consulting, or equivalent senior strategic roles.
- 5+ years directly advising C-suite executives or equivalent enterprise decision-makers.
- 5+ years independently leading complex, high-ambiguity, cross-functional strategy engagements.
- 3+ years leading and coaching multi-person, multi-level strategy teams.
- Advanced structured problem-solving, quantitative analysis, financial modeling, scenario development, synthesis, and executive communication skills.
- Demonstrated ability to form an independent point of view, challenge established assumptions constructively and influence senior stakeholders across a complex global matrix without relying on formal authority.
- Strong commercial and financial judgment and the ability to understand complex scientific and technology-driven markets and translate them into enterprise implications.
- Ability to travel domestically and internationally up to 20%.
- Flexibility to support time-sensitive ELT or Board decision cycles across global time zones.
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Retirement benefits
- Paid time off
- Family planning
- Genomics sequencing access
- Equity
- Bonus program
Company overview
Illumina is a global leader in genomics technology, founded in 1998 and headquartered in San Diego, California. As a pioneering biotechnology company, Illumina specializes in developing, manufacturing, and marketing integrated systems for genetic analysis, with a primary focus on DNA sequencing and array-based technologies. The company's mission is to improve human health by unlocking the power of the genome, serving customers across research, clinical, and applied markets worldwide. Illumina's innovative platforms, including the NovaSeq, HiSeq, MiSeq, and NextSeq series, have revolutionized genomic research and clinical applications, enabling breakthroughs in personalized medicine, disease research, and drug development. With over 9,000 employees across 27 countries, Illumina has established itself as the dominant force in next-generation sequencing, processing more than 90% of all DNA sequencing data globally. The company's technologies support diverse applications from cancer research and rare disease diagnosis to agricultural genomics and infectious disease surveillance, making genomic insights accessible to researchers and clinicians worldwide.