Associate Director, Field Design & Evaluation -Wilmington, DE

Overviewof Strategic Field Operations (SFO) for the Biopharmaceuticals Business Unit

At AstraZeneca, we're not afraid to do things differently. We're resetting expectations of what a bio-pharmaceutical company can be. This means we're opening new ways to work, ground-breaking and cutting-edge methods and bringing unexpected teams together.

AstraZeneca is organized around two core business units, Biopharmaceuticals (BBU) and Oncology. The BBU focuses on development and commercialization of AstraZeneca’s Respiratory, Cardiovascular, Metabolic, Renal, and Infectious Disease therapeutic areas.

Strategic Field Operations (SFO) is a criticalfunction that enables success in the growth of the BBU business. Our ambition is to build an industry-leading organizationwhich A)supports senior leadership with critical resourcing and business decision making and B)empowers our Commercial teams through the generation of compelling insights and delivery of tools and capabilities to deliver impactful launches that change the practice of medicine for the benefit of patients. 

Within SFO, the Field Design and Analytics function is focused on four main areas: i., field force resource allocation planning, ii., advancing core capabilities such as omnichannel and dynamic targeting iii., Go-To-Market and pilot designs and iv.,measurement / insight generation. 

Job description

TheField Design and EvaluationAssociate Director at AstraZeneca will be responsible forleading a range of analytical projects leveraging analyticsthat provide commercial teams measurable insights into commercial strategies and tactics. The role will be withing Strategic Field Operations (SFO), and work closely brand teams, 3rd party vendors and other cross-functional business partnersto understand opportunities and transform insights into business actions

The identified candidate should havestrong analytics capabilities combined with strong communicationand influencing skills. As such, those who will qualify for this position are both technically sound and have the ability to be a proactive internal consultant, contributing to AstraZeneca's commercial organization beyond their analytical prowess through their understanding of secondary data, industry knowledge, and track record of innovative and impactful decision support.

Key responsibilities

• Develop a deep understanding of the AZ’s US Biopharma Business Unit’s core markets, the field facing teams,brandstrategies, field deployments, data and analytical needs

• Generate insights relating to field force deployments that create a competitive advantage for our commercial organization.  Examples include conducting test / control analysis, leverage promo response capabilities and other multivariate and univariate approaches.  

• Conduct hands on analytics as well as collaborate/ manage internal analytics product owners(e.g., Data Science & Advanced Analytics) and 3rd party vendors to prioritize workload and identify the right analytics approach for the business question at hand.

• Steward key aspects of the promo response modelling cycle, from definition of business questions and hypotheses to data sourcing and preparation, model deployment, and insight generation and communication.  Specific accountabilities include stewarding futurization and QC processes of historical promo response models, insight generation from brand models, recommendations for enhancements to approach and processes, consultation on scenario results.  

• Serve as a key SFO point and partner with Data Science and IA for the development of Dynamic Segmentation / Targeting and AI driven omni orchestration.  

• Serve as a subject matter expertto internal stakeholders on the use of advanced analytics and field related insight generation

Essential requirements

• Quantitative Degree from accredited college or university is required in one of the following or related fields: Engineering, Operations Research, Management Science, Economics, Statistics, Math, Physics, Computer Science or Data Science.

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in applying advanced analytics methods to large and disparate datasets preferably in the context of Omnichannel marketing, specifically:

• Statistical Analysis and Modelling: (e.g. Design of Experiments, Time Series Analysis, Regression Analysis, Bayesian methods, etc),

• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

• Optimization and Simulation.

• Hands-on experience and deep theoretical expertise in Design of Experiments

• Hands-on experience and deep theoretical expertise in Deep learning models (CNN, RNN) 

• Expert-level programming experience with either Python or R.

• Knowledge of SQL and/or other data management languages (e.g. Hive, Impala, Hbase, etc)

Desirable Requirements

• Pharma industryknowledge.

• Strong leadership and interpersonal skills with demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with a significant number of business leaders and cross-functional business partners.

• Strong organizational skills and time management; ability to handle diverse range of simultaneous projects.

• Experience with machine learning libraries and tools, such as Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, Keras and PyTorch.