Director, Data Science

At AstraZeneca, we put patients first and strive to meet their unmet needs worldwide. Working here means being entrepreneurial, thinking big and working together to make the impossible a reality. If you are swift to action, confident to lead, willing to collaborate, and curious about what science can do, then you’re our kind of person. We harness digital, data science & AI to fast-forward our research. Making sure work born in a lab can make a real difference. Everyday, impacting patients’ lives across the world.

The Data Science team is focused on applying data science and machine learning research to the toughest challenges in R&D at AstraZeneca. We are a team of experts with Machine Learning and Data Science backgrounds, solving problems for pharma and clinical trials. We innovate together with our leading statisticians, biologists, chemists, and clinicians to close the gap between today's challenges using data science. If you want to have an impact on transforming patients' lives by accelerating new medicines to patients, this may be the position for you!

We are looking for a Director, Data Scientist to join our Data Science team. Located in Boston, Massachusetts (Waltham)

What you’ll do

In this role, you will use your hands-on expertise in data science and machine learning tolead projects and develop strategic programs to deliver valuable insights from data. You will do this by solving challenging problems facing clinical development and related departments.

You will work directly with senior stakeholders in clinical development, clinical operations and related departments across BioPharma R&D (which includes respiratory, immunology, cardiovascular, renal, metabolic, neuroscience and vaccines).You will have the opportunity to collaborate extensively with other teams across the organization who will have both clinical and data science backgrounds to form innovative solutions to problems in pharma.  You will get opportunities to present your findings to senior stakeholders and publish your findings in scientific journals and conferences.  Your work will support activities across early and late stages of clinical drug development.  The team’s deliverables have already had a significant impact by providing insights to accelerate and enrich clinical trials, support regulatory interactions and establishing novel digital biomarkers.  We welcome new ideas and innovations to help us continue to add value.  Our ultimate goal is to deliver products and novel insights to improve patient’s lives.

Key responsibilities

• Lead cross-disciplinary project teams in a complex matrix organization to deliver projects across business areas with competing priorities.

• Hands-on use of data science, machine learning and visualization to challenges faced in drug development including support for design and interpretation of clinical trials

• Use data science and AI to deliver insights in clinical projects within pharma.

• Identify opportunities, drive outcomes and results, then clearly communicate financial and business benefits to variety of stakeholders.

• Contribute to strategic discussions at a portfolio level.

• Mentor and coach junior colleagues.

• Lead the team to use good software engineering practices, e.g. GitHub, Jira, Docker, unit testing, DVC, etc.  Proposing and driving improvements in this area.

• Ensure work is compliant with clinical development and other appropriate regulations and procedures

• Communicate machine learning, statistical methods and insights to various domain experts, e.g. clinical teams, data scientists, senior management, statisticians, external collaborators

• Develop collaborations with external academic and commercial enterprises

• Contribute ideas and provide creative input within the data science community at AstraZeneca

• Continue to develop as a data scientist / machine learning expert using assigned personal development time.

Essential for the role

• Ph.D. in machine learning, data science, computer science, statistics

• Or MSc in machine learning, data science, computer science, statistics and substantial experience applying machine learning and data science technologies in late stage pharma setting

• Knowledge of disease / therapy area / clinical domain knowledge within pharma, ideally experience in biopharma

• Track record of delivery excellence, with a fail fast philosophy, and ability to maintain focus in demanding high impact situations when they arise

• Deep knowledge and understanding of machine learning algorithms – including pros and cons of different approaches

• Understanding of how to create robust and well tested models, considering data privacy and ethical AI principles

• Experienced in Python and familiar with modern software engineering practices and the use of modern collaborative tools (familiarity with some or all of the following:- AWS or similar cloud technology, GitHub, Jira, Docker, unit testing, DVC etc.)

• Excellent communication skills and team working skills to achieve objectives.

• Build project level strategy, provide leadership of junior members through mentorship and coaching skills

Desirable for the role

• Experience within the pharmaceutical industry and ability to demonstrate understanding of drug development and clinical trial process and data is highly desirable

• Experienced with clinical data standards, GxP framework, medical terminologies and controlled vocabularies used in healthcare data and ontologies

• Use of Machine Learning to address medical or pharmaceutical problems with patient level data

• Track record of collaborating successfully on cross-disciplinary global teams delivering impactful data science projects and analyses for stakeholders.

• Multiple published papers and/or patents, contribution to open source projects.