VP, Portfolio Operations

Location:

Hybrid, Iselin, NJ

Medidata follows a hybrid office policy in which employees who are hired for an in‑person position are expected to work on site a certain number of days per week following Company policy.

Medidata is powering smarter treatments and healthier people through digital solutions to support clinical trials. Celebrating over 25 years of ground‑breaking technological innovation across more than 38,000 trials and 12 million patients, Medidata offers industry‑leading expertise, analytics‑powered insights, and one of the largest clinical trial data sets in the industry. More than 1 million registered users across approximately 2,300 customers trust Medidata's seamless, end‑to‑end platform to improve patient experiences, accelerate clinical breakthroughs, and bring therapies to market faster.

The Head of Corporate Technology is a high‑impact, strategic leadership role responsible for the design, optimization, and evolution of the company's internal technology ecosystem. This leader brings a transformation mindset, operating at the intersection of enterprise technology, AI enablement and business performance. This role drives unit‑economic efficiency, data‑driven decision‑making, and autonomous AI orchestration across all business units.

• Design and execute a technology roadmap that enables the organization to scale 5x by deploying autonomous AI agents capable of executing cross‑functional workflows without manual intervention.
• Own the technology budget with a focus on aggressive cost optimization. Audit SaaS sprawl and replace high‑cost "seat‑based" licensing with proprietary, task‑specific AI models to decouple growth from headcount.
• Lead the evaluation of internal tools, deciding when to leverage off‑the‑shelf solutions vs. fine‑tuning open‑source LLMs on proprietary data to create a defensible competitive advantage.
• Architect the corporate data strategy using Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) to index every Slack thread, document, and meeting, creating a "Corporate Brain" for instant, secure internal search.
• Lead the "AI‑First" internal initiative. Move beyond static dashboards to predictive analytics that forecast KPIs, identify churn risks, and suggest real‑time operational pivots.
• Establish data governance and AI transparency standards to ensure that models are accurate, secure, and compliant, with proactive audits for algorithmic bias and "model drift."
• Beyond contract negotiation, manage a portfolio of "AI‑enabled" vendors. Evaluate vendor AI roadmaps and data‑sharing policies to ensure third‑party tools integrate into our proprietary intelligence layer without leaking IP.
• Apply rigorous framework for retiring legacy systems. Identify and eliminate "Digital Rot" by migrating high‑maintenance legacy processes into agile, AI‑orchestrated microservices.
• Oversee the management of core platforms (e.g., Salesforce, ERP, HRIS), ensuring they are unified through intelligent API layers that allow AI agents to read and write data across the entire stack.
• Build internal workflows that prioritize Natural Language Interfaces, allowing employees to interact with complex enterprise software through simple, intuitive conversational prompts.
• Manage and maintain compliance (e.g., HIPAA, SOC2, PCI) using continuous automated monitoring, ensuring the organization remains audit‑ready as data volume scales exponentially.
• Connect technology investments directly to P&L outcomes. You should be as comfortable calculating Inference ROI as you are in an architecture review.

• Bachelor's or Master's in related field; MBA is highly desirable.
• 10+ years in technology leadership, with a proven track record of managing enterprise‑wide AI deployments in a high‑growth "scale‑up" environment.
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (Azure/AWS), Salesforce ecosystems, and modern data warehousing, including Vector Databases and unstructured data pipelines.
• Hands‑on experience implementing LLM frameworks (e.g., Lang Chain, Llama Index) or agentic systems to solve real‑world friction (not just theoretical pilots).
• Experience leading a high‑performing team of…