Director- Software Engineering LeadAstraZeneca · 2 Locations
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AstraZeneca

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Director- Software Engineering Lead

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🗓️ Posted 2026-08-26 2 Locations Full-time Hybrid ICT
💰 Salary Not shared 📊 Market 8,333 GBP–12,500 GBP/mo

About the Company

We're transforming the future of healthcare by unlocking the power of what science can do for people, society and the planet. For more information, visit www.astrazeneca.com. Community Guidelines: bit.ly/2MgAcio Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Specialties: Pharmaceutical, Biopharmaceutical, Innovation, Research and development, Global business

Responsibilities

  • ● Define and lead a multi-year technical vision for AI applications and platforms, aligning technology choices to business outcomes and total cost of ownership.
  • ● Establish and carry out architecture principles, reference designs, and patterns for full-stack AI solutions to ensure reliability, security, and scalability.
  • ● Provide technical leadership across a portfolio of AI initiatives; review solution designs, mediate trade-offs, and ensure value delivery through stage gates and measurable objectives.
  • ● Drive shared components, APIs, model/prompt registries, feature stores, RAG services, and internal developer tooling to accelerate delivery and standardize quality.
  • ● Lead model selection frameworks, evaluation methods, prompt governance, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns for LLMs, agents, and retrieval systems.
  • ● Own technical standards for SLOs, resilience, observability, and cost efficiency; guide guidelines for model and service performance monitoring and continuous improvement in production.
  • ● Embed security, privacy, and ethical AI principles into building and delivery, including bias testing, explainability, and provenance; collaborate with Security, Legal, and Compliance on governance and audits.
  • ● Translate strategy into roadmaps and reference implementations with Product, Data Science, and Platform Engineering; influence adoption through technical guidance rather than line authority.
  • ● Mentor and upskill senior engineers and technical leads; cultivate communities of practice and technical learning programs to amplify impact.
  • ● Evaluate and guide strategic technology partners and platforms, setting technical guardrails, SLAs, and cost controls.
  • ● Scan emerging technologies, run targeted pilots, and transition validated innovations into production-ready standards.

Requirements

  • ● 15+ years in software/AI engineering with a strong record of technical leadership; experience guiding managers and senior engineers through technical influence rather than formal management.
  • ● Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience); advanced degree preferred.
  • ● Deep experience designing distributed, cloud-native systems and microservices; strong understanding of data architectures and API ecosystems.
  • ● Confirmed expertise with ML and GenAI solution patterns at scale, including model lifecycle management, ML Ops, and proven ability to guide teams in delivering AI responsibly.