Tooling Evolution Lead Engineer

Role Summary

Engineering Activation & Tooling is responsible for the tools, access, and onboarding experience that let engineers across Pfizer's eight platforms start delivering from Day One — and for making sure the estate of tools they rely on keeps pace with a wave of new developer and AI capabilities.

We are seeking an experienced Tooling Evolution Lead (individual contributor, principal-level) who will own the evaluation, industrialisation, and lifecycle of engineering and AI developer tools across the organisation. In this role, you will run the governed intake process new tools and proofs-of-concept go through, score them against a shared evidence framework, and decide — on evidence rather than instinct — what earns a fast, contained pilot, what graduates to the supported core estate, and what gets retired once usage data says it is no longer earning its place.

Responsibilities

• Own and run the governed tool-intake and evaluation lifecycle end-to-end, from a proposal reaching you through to a scored, evidence-based decision — available, pilot, declining, or rejected.
• Define and evolve the evaluation framework itself, keeping its criteria current as new tool categories (agentic coding tools, MCP-based integrations, LLM-native workflows) emerge faster than any static rubric anticipates.
• Build and run the industrialisation pathway that takes a successful pilot from unofficial, contained use to a supported, published part of the core estate — including a fast-track lane for tools accessed through an already-governed gateway.
• Maintain a live, portfolio-level view of every tool in flight across the estate — piloting, scaling, steady-state, declining — so tooling is a managed portfolio rather than an accumulating backlog nobody revisits.
• Partner with the Engineering & AI Guild and the Product & Delivery Guild, who scout tools in and carry adoption messaging back out to their communities; you own the evaluation decision, they own the relationship with the people who will use it.
• Partner with Tooling Operations to translate usage, cost, and license telemetry into evidence-led retirement and rationalization decisions, with a real migration path for anything being phased out.
• Own the adoption and value-realization story for tools that clear evaluation — proving, not just asserting, that a tool is delivering the value it was industrialized for.
• Act as the technical and governance authority other teams build against: your maturity tiers are what the onboarding portal displays to engineers and PMs across all eight platforms, and what platform owners (e.g., Shield on security policy, Sentinel on infrastructure policy) rely on being executed consistently.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, platform/developer-tooling product management, or a closely related technical field, including direct ownership of a tooling, platform, or developer-experience roadmap.
• Demonstrated experience evaluating, selecting, or governing engineering tools or SaaS platforms at an enterprise level, balancing technical fit, cost, security, and developer experience.
• Practical, hands-on experience evaluating or rolling out AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, agentic coding assistants) within the last 12–18 months.
• Enough technical fluency across CI/CD, IDEs, SaaS integration patterns, and cloud-native architectures to hold a credible evaluation conversation with engineers and vendors without needing to build the tools yourself.
• Experience translating enterprise governance, security, or compliance requirements into a process engineers will actually follow.
• Proven ability to influence and align stakeholders across a large, matrixed organisation without formal authority over them — including platform owners, security/compliance teams, and community/guild leads.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate an evidence-based case to both engineers and senior stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in a large, regulated enterprise environment (e.g., pharmaceutical, healthcare, financial services, aerospace).
• Experience running a portfolio-management or tool-rationalisation process, including retiring or deprecating tools based on usage evidence.
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar emerging AI-tooling integration standards.
• Experience partnering with community-of-practice groups, guilds, or developer-relations functions as an intake or adoption channel.
• Experience designing or applying a multi-dimension evaluation or scoring framework for technology or vendor decisions.
• Familiarity with SaaS license administration, chargeback/showback models, or consumption-based cost telemetry.
• Track record of taking a proof-of-concept through to a fully industrialised, enterprise-supported capability.

Work Environment

Working with a cross-functional team in different time zones will be required. Minimal travel (20–25%) required for this role. Work Location Assignment: Hybrid — must be able to work from assigned Pfizer office 2-3 days per week, or as needed by the business.