Senior Director, Head of AI Clinical Operations

We're building a connected, end-to-end Enterprise AI engine - uniting data foundations, AI technology, process reinvention, and business-facing AI to accelerate results across the whole value chain. Success depends on being exceptional connectors: you'll actively leverage existing capabilities, celebrate and promote reuse, export breakthrough ideas across geographies and functions, and obsess over scaling impact rather than building in isolation. If you thrive in high-collaboration environments where your role is to turn complex, cross-functional problems into reusable, enterprise-wide capabilities - and where the measure of success is adoption and scale, not just innovation - you'll have the platform (and sponsorship) to make it real.

AI Science & Innovation (AISI) sits at the centre of AstraZeneca's R&D AI transformation. Our remit is to build, buy and deliver the AI models and agents that change pipeline outcomes, across discovery, translational science, biomarkers and clinical development.

AstraZeneca is building a world-class AI capability for Clinical Development within AISI to accelerate the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical trials across our Oncology and Bio Pharmaceuticals pipeline. We are hiring the Head of AI for Clinical Operations to lead the science and the team that turns AI promise into real-world operational improvements in how AstraZeneca runs its trials.

This is one of the highest impact challenges in AI for healthcare. Trials run for years, span thousands of clinicians and patients across dozens of countries, and generate streams of noisy, heterogeneous, regulated data. The playbook for AI in this environment will be developed in the next two to three years. You will advance the science of AI for trial execution and bring better treatments to patients, faster, while adhering to the highest evidentiary, GxP, and patient safety standards.

We're hiring someone who sees this high bar as the reason to come, not a reason to hesitate.

The AI for Clinical Development function is being built from the ground up, and you'll help define how AstraZeneca does AI for clinical operations. Expect an outsized voice with regulators, scientific consortia, and external partners during the narrow window when the rules of the road for agentic AI, AI/ML governance, and AI in trial conduct are being written.

We hire for learning agility and technical excellence. The strongest candidate is the person who learns fast, is comfortable with ambiguity, prototypes early, fails forward, and partners credibly across communities (ML, clinical, biostatistics, regulatory). We’re seeking an engineer-leader with the leadership, technical depth, and curiosity to develop, adapt, and apply the most advanced methods in AI (e.g., agentic systems, multimodal foundation models, tool-use and orchestration, domain-specific evaluation environments) to clinical operations workflows, and who can sit across from clinical operations teams to translate their priorities into actionable, evaluable AI solutions.

Above all, this is a role where the science matters. Every model you ship will eventually touch a trial, and a patient. That is the bar we hold ourselves to, and the bar we hire to.

• Lead AstraZeneca's AI R&D for clinical operations across Oncology and Bio Pharmaceuticals — turning AI into measurable cycle-time, quality, and patient-experience outcomes in live trials.
• Lead a team of AI researchers and engineers to deliver AI for trial planning, conduct, monitoring, and reporting across the trial lifecycle.
• Partner closely with Clinical Operations to design and implement a strategy for AI-enabled operations.
• Develop and deploy agentic systems for high-leverage trial workflows (e.g., AI-assisted protocol authoring, eligibility screening and patient-trial matching, site selection, AE and SAE detection, query and data-review acceleration, source data verification, risk-based monitoring decision support).
• Build the AI for Clinical Development team's reusable evaluation environments for clinical agents so that every system shipped has a defensible measurement story.
• Oversee the…