Director,Applied AI Job Collegeville area,Pennsylvania USA,Software Development

Locations

United States – Pennsylvania – Collegeville
United States – New York – New York City

Role Summary

As Director, Applied AI, you lead the realization of AI strategy into tangible, production‑grade solutions, platforms, and products. You operate at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and product thinking — translating strategy, patterns, and standards into working systems deployed in real enterprise environments.

Why This Role Matters

Pfizer’s purpose — breakthroughs that change patients’ lives — depends on turning strategy into systems that truly work. This role ensures strategy and architecture become real, working solutions — deployable, integrated, and sustainable in production — and that the team and partners around you deliver to the same standard.

Candidate Profile

You are a hands‑on technical leader with strong execution capability and architectural judgment. You operate across disciplines — architecture, engineering, and product — and drive solutions from ambiguous beginnings to production reality. You are known for enforcing technical truth: ensuring what is built is correct, complete, scalable, and aligned with enterprise systems. You can frame a technical decision in terms of the business outcome it serves, and you can lead a mixed team of engineers, contractors, and vendors to ship it.

Responsibilities

Translate strategic intent and architectural patterns into working AI solutions and platforms; own the end‑to‑end architecture and implementation shape of major solutions, ensuring they are production‑ready, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise architecture.

Lead technical design and execution across complex initiatives as architect, tech lead, and delivery driver; contribute hands‑on code where it accelerates delivery and de‑risks execution, and guide teams through design decisions, implementation trade‑offs, and integration challenges.

Ensure seamless integration across platforms and services, data systems, AI models, and business workflows — connecting models to real use cases, guardrails to runtime systems, and observability to operational feedback loops within enterprise constraints.

Lead and coordinate a delivery team of full‑time engineers, contractors, and vendor resources; direct day‑to‑day technical execution, review their work to Pfizer’s quality and security bar, manage dependencies and throughput, and grow the capability of the people you lead.

Identify and challenge incomplete or fragile architectures, solutions that are not production‑ready, and unrealistic assumptions; enforce engineering discipline in scalability, observability, performance, and security so solutions meet enterprise quality and reliability standards.

Translate business problems into feasible, high‑impact technical solutions, communicate solution direction in terms of business and commercial outcomes, and provide grounded technical input into domain‑level AI strategy.

Basic Qualifications

10+ years in software engineering, AI/ML, or architecture roles, with a strong delivery track record.
Proven experience building production‑grade AI/ML systems or platforms.
Current hands‑on coding ability and strong depth across at least 2–3 of: AI/ML and generative AI; system design/architecture; data engineering; cloud engineering.
Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives end‑to‑end.
Experience leading or coordinating engineers, contractors, and vendors to deliver production systems.
Ability to connect technical decisions to business and commercial outcomes.
Experience operating in cross‑functional, matrixed environments.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with LLMs, retrieval architectures, AI agents, observability, monitoring, AI governance and guardrails.
Experience with Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, MCP development, and Claude Skill Development.
Prior role in biopharma TA, epidemiology, or similar with hands‑on real‑world data experience.
Experience in enterprise‑scale or regulated environments.
Experience leading platform or large solution‑development efforts.
Familiarity with CI/CD, Dev Ops, and production operations.

Organizational Relationships

Senior Director, Applied AI;…