Description
Syneos Health, a leading fully integrated biopharmaceutical solutions organization, is seeking an Associate Director/Director, AI & Engineering. The successful candidate will own engineering execution for a complex product or platform, a related portfolio, or multiple teams across discovery, planning, design, build, test, release, adoption, production operations, and continuous improvement.
The role involves translating product and business strategy into a multi-quarter engineering roadmap, investment priorities, staffing plan, modernization agenda, and measurable outcome framework. The ideal candidate will partner with Product Management, business stakeholders, Architecture, Quality Engineering, Data, Security, Compliance, and Operations to convert priorities into measurable customer and business outcomes.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading cross-team planning, dependency management, architecture governance, risk and cost decisions, release coordination, and transparent executive-level delivery communication
- Establishing and governing engineering standards for architecture and design reviews, secure coding, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, performance, reliability, accessibility, documentation, and production readiness
- Using business, product, flow, quality, reliability, cost, and talent metrics to improve predictability, deployment health, service resilience, developer experience, and business value
- Building reusable engineering and AI patterns across products, reducing duplicated solutions, and creating durable platform capabilities through automation-first, API-first, cloud-native, and disciplined technical-debt practices
- Creating an AI-first culture that applies approved AI capabilities responsibly across the product development lifecycle, with human oversight, evaluation, traceability, privacy, security, intellectual-property protection, cost awareness, and measurable outcomes
- Leading managers, technical leaders, senior engineers, partners, and vendors; establishing decision rights, operating rhythms, performance expectations, capability plans, and succession depth across teams
The successful candidate will have:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience
- Typically 12+ years of progressive software engineering and technology leadership experience, including substantial people-management responsibility
- Proven ownership of a complex enterprise product or platform, related product portfolio, or multi-team delivery environment through the full product development lifecycle
- Demonstrated experience leading multiple teams and/or managers, shaping engineering strategy, managing cross-functional dependencies, and influencing senior stakeholders
- Strong technology breadth across architecture, cloud, APIs, distributed systems, data, DevSecOps, quality engineering, observability, reliability, security, and operational governance
- Track record of using business, product, delivery, quality, reliability, cost, and talent metrics to guide decisions and improve outcomes
- Practical leadership experience with AI/ML, Generative AI, Applied AI, RAG, AI agents, agentic workflows, LLMOps/MLOps, AI evaluation, responsible AI governance, or AI-assisted engineering practices is preferred