Senior Director, Head of Artificial Intelligence

Location of role

Gaithersburg, MD, Conshohocken, PA or Oxford, UK

Information Technology

The Senior Director, Head of Artificial Intelligence is the accountable leader for AI  role owns the enterprise AI strategy, roadmap, operating model, vendor strategy, and value realization across the company, and leads a small team. The mandate is to build a practical, governed enterprise AI capability: near-term agentic automation of repeatable employee tasks on AWS, broad and safe employee adoption of AI, and readiness for longer-term scientific, clinical, and commercial AI opportunities.

This is a player-coach role. The successful candidate combines business transformation leadership with sufficient hands-on technical depth to credibly challenge implementation partners, AWS, and internal engineering decisions. They will lead the partner-supported build of the AWS agentic platform (Amazon Bedrock / Agent Core) and are accountable for full handover of capability to the internal team, avoiding permanent partner dependency.

The role partners closely with IT Compliance, Legal, Security, Infrastructure, Data, and business functions, and owns executive communication, steering committee reporting, and investment cases. It also carries the scientific and healthcare AI agenda: evaluating foundation-model, research informatics, clinical, and commercial AI opportunities with R&D and business stakeholders, so that the AI capability is not designed narrowly around IT automation.

• Develop, own and communicate Immunocore's enterprise AI strategy and roadmap, aligned with business goals and endorsed by the ILT, and lead its execution through two direct reports.
• Own the AWS agentic automation platform direction at the business and architecture level, maintaining one manageable, governed platform rather than multiple overlapping AI stacks.
• Manage vendor strategy and commercial relationships with the implementation partner, AWS, Snowflake, Microsoft, and future healthcare AI vendors, including contractual handover and exit criteria that build internal capability rather than dependency.
• Chair the AI intake, prioritization, and governance forum, sequencing and prioritizing use cases across automation, employee enablement, commercial analytics, and scientific opportunities in line with business priorities.
• Design the responsible AI operating model (risk tiering, approval gates, evaluation, human-in-the-loop rules, auditability) in partnership with IT Compliance and Legal, who own the underlying compliance and legal frameworks.
• Own executive communication: steering committee updates, investment cases, benefits reporting, and ROI of the AI portfolio.
• Ensure measurable value realization from deployed agents (hours saved, cycle-time reduction, quality improvement, adoption, risk reduction).
• Lead assessment of scientific, clinical, and healthcare foundation-model opportunities with R&D, Medical, and Commercial stakeholders, protecting dedicated capacity for this agenda alongside near-term automation.
• Ensure the agentic platform is built domain-agnostic so future scientific, clinical, and commercial use cases can run under the same governance, evaluation, and observability stack.
• Foster safe, productive employee AI adoption and a culture of innovation, positioning the Immunocore Digital team as a strategic partner and change catalyst.
• Recruit, develop, and retain the AI team; define and maintain the boundary between what the AI team owns and what is coordinated through Infrastructure, Security, IT Compliance, Legal, and Data teams.
• Stay abreast of AI, agentic automation, and life-sciences AI trends; build external relationships with partners, vendors, and academia.