Sr. Director, Engineering Lead

About the Role

We are seeking a skilled People Leader with strong expertise in Engineering who will lead a team of Software Engineers to design, build, and maintain software systems that deliver business value. In this role, you will focus on code quality, architecture decisions, and reliable delivery while leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity.

You will lead and grow a high-performing team to deliver AI-first digital capabilities and AI-native platforms, shaping both the technology and the talent that will define our digital future.

This role encompasses organization-wide technical strategy, people management and architectural direction. You will define strategic direction and be accountable for outcomes, shape organizational practices and maintain external industry visibility. You will handle organizational-scale complexity creating clarity from chaos.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Delivery: Drive delivery of the most critical technical initiatives and platforms, establish engineering delivery practices, and be the technical authority on high-stakes projects
• People: Lead team of technical leaders, develop their expert skills shape engineering talent strategy, build high-performing teams, and own succession planning
• Business: Shape technology-driven business strategy, represent technical perspective at executive level
• AI: Lead design of AI-augmented engineering workflows for your area, evaluate new AI tools, train engineers on effective AI usage, and balance speed with verification
• Reliability: Establish SLOs/SLIs across teams, build resilient systems, lead reliability initiatives for your area, mentor engineers on reliability practices, and drive reliability culture
• Documentation: Establish documentation standards across teams in your area, build knowledge management systems, and mentor engineers on effective technical writing
• Process: Drive process efficiency within your team, coordinate cross-functional technical work, and lead retrospectives

ROLE BEHAVIOURS

• Don't Lose Your Curiosity: Shapes organizational culture around curiosity and continuous learning; sponsors experimental initiatives across the organization; recognized as a thought leader in problem discovery; influences industry practices around innovation and exploration
• Set an example for your team: Consistently demonstrates a clear vision, positive energy, and exemplary expert actions that motivate your team of direct reports to strive for their highest potential
• Own the Outcome: Defines organizational accountability standards focused on business impact; shapes industry practices around outcome ownership in the AI era; sponsors transformational initiatives with full outcome accountability; recognized externally for ownership culture leadership
• Be Polymath Oriented: Enables cross-disciplinary learning across the team; inspires creation of holistic solutions spanning technical and business domains; embodies the Renaissance Engineer ideal; translates specialized knowledge into accessible explanations; thinks like a business insider
• Communicate with Precision: Enables spec-driven development practices; mentors others on precise communication; spans C-level executives to frontline workers; drives clarity as a core value across their function; represents the organization externally
• Think in Systems: Shapes systems design practices across their function; enables chaos engineering experiments; influences cross-team architecture decisions; creates clarity from complexity; bridges technical systems with business processes

QUALIFICATIONS

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field with 12+ years of relevant experience.

EXPERT-LEVEL SKILLS

• Business Immersion: You are a recognized thought leader across business stakeholders. You influence business strategy, exemplify the business immersion mindset, and shape how engineering engages with the business.
• Data Integration: You lead definition of data integration patterns and best practices. You enable architecture of large-scale data flows, solve the most complex integration challenges, and are the authority on enterprise data integration.
• Full-Stack Development: You work comfortably in any language and rapidly acquire new skillsas needed and ensure same for your team of direct reports. You deliver production solutions in days not months, shape full-stack practices, and exemplify polymathic engineering.
• Multi-Audience Communication: You shape communication practices across teams. You represent engineering externally, communicate at board and executive level, and are recognized as an exceptional communicator who bridges any audience gap.
• Problem Discovery: You shape approaches to problem discovery. You are recognized for transforming ambiguous situations into clear opportunities, influence how teams engage with business problems, and are the go-to person for the most undefined challenges.
• Engineering Delivery & Quality: You shape engineering delivery culture. You define standards for quality, reliability, and scalable delivery, and are recognized for driving consistent, high-impact outcomes across complex initiatives.
• Stakeholder Management: You shape stakeholder practices and manage executive relationships, represent engineering at the highest levels, and are recognized for exceptional stakeholder partnerships.

PEOPLE MANAGER SKILLS

• Leading the team: You are setting a clear direction for your team, aligning people around shared goals, and ensuring strong communication to drive collective success. You are also developing talent, fostering collaboration, and creating an environment where individuals feel empowered to perform at their best
• Team Collaboration: You create collaborative culture in your team. You transform dysfunctional team dynamics, are recognized for building exceptional teams, and mentor others on collaboration excellence.
• Knowledge Management: You grow experts and lead knowledge management initiatives across your team, create knowledge systems and taxonomies, establish practices that make institutional knowledge persistent, and mentor others on knowledge sharing.
• Time Management & Deep Work: You protect focused time of your direct reports for complex work, balance multiple priorities without dropping balls, minimize context switching, and help others understand your team capacity.

PRACTITIONER-LEVEL SKILLS

• AI Evaluation & Verification: You lead AI governance initiatives across teams in your area, create evaluation standards and checklists, and train engineers on rigorous AI verification. You design review processes for AI-assisted work.
• AI Literacy: You guide AI adoption decisions across teams in your area, assess AI risks and benefits systematically, and train engineers on responsible AI usage. You design human-in-the-loop workflows.
• AI-Augmented Development: You optimize AI tool usage across teams in your area, train engineers on AI-augmented workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance AI speed with verification rigor.
• Architecture & Design: You design complex multi-component systems end-to-end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives across teams, guide technical decisions for your area, and mentor engineers on architecture. You balance elegance with delivery needs.
• Code Quality & Review: You establish and enforce quality standards across teams in your area. You mentor engineers on effective code review, ensure verification depth for AI-assisted development, and drive testing strategies.
• Pattern Generalization: You lead pattern generalization initiatives across teams, define criteria for when to generalize vs keep custom, and establish intake processes for receiving and scaling validated solutions. You mentor engineers on abstraction design.
• Service Management: You lead service management practices for multiple services across teams, optimize service portfolios for your area, balance service investments, and train engineers on service-oriented thinking.
• Site Reliability Engineering: You define reliability standards across teams in your area, drive post-incident improvements systematically, design capacity planning processes, and mentor engineers on SRE practices.
• Technical Writing: You define documentation standards across teams in your area, create documentation systems and templates, train engineers on spec-driven development, and ensure documentation quality across projects.

WORKING-LEVEL SKILLS

• Cloud Platforms: You design cloud-native solutions, manage infrastructure as code, implement security best practices, and make informed service selections. You troubleshoot cloud-specific issues.
• Data Modeling: You create efficient data models that balance normalization with query performance. You optimize queries, handle schema migrations safely, and choose appropriate storage technologies.
• DevOps & CI/CD: You build complete CI/CD pipelines end-to-end, manage infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), implement monitoring, and design deployment strategies for your services.
• Lean Thinking & Flow: You optimize team processes systematically, measure and improve cycle time, remove bottlenecks proactively, and deliver rapidly while maintaining quality.
• Technical Debt Management: You prioritize debt systematically based on risk and impact, balance debt reduction with feature work, and make pragmatic trade-offs. You know when to take on debt intentionally.

Additional Information

Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

Work Location Assignment: Hybrid

On site strongly preferred. Remote locations will only be considered for internal candidates who are already designated remote.

Last Date to Apply for Job: 7/28/2026

The annual base salary for this position ranges from $214,900.00 to $358,100.00. In addition, this position is eligible for participation in Pfizer’s Global Performance Plan with a bonus target of 22.5% of the base salary and eligibility to participate in our share based long term incentive program. We offer comprehensive and generous benefits and programs to help our colleagues lead healthy lives and to support each of life’s moments. Benefits offered include a 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution, paid vacation, holiday and personal days, paid caregiver/parental and medical leave, and health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage. Learn more at Pfizer Candidate Site – U.S. Benefits | (uscandidates.mypfizerbenefits.com). Pfizer compensation structures and benefit packages are aligned based on the location of hire. The United States salary range provided does not apply to Tampa, FL or any location outside of the United States. This role is posted in multiple locations. If you are applying for the role in an secondary job posting location where pay transparency regulations apply, your Talent Advisor will share the local pay information with you during the first interview.

Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

Candidates must be authorized to be employed in the U.S. by any employer.

U.S. work visa sponsorship (such as TN, O-1, H-1B, etc.) is not available for this role now or in the future.

Sunshine Act

Pfizer reports payments and other transfers of value to health care providers as required by federal and state transparency laws and implementing regulations. These laws and regulations require Pfizer to provide government agencies with information such as a health care provider’s name, address and the type of payments or other value received, generally for public disclosure. Subject to further legal review and statutory or regulatory clarification, which Pfizer intends to pursue, reimbursement of recruiting expenses for licensed physicians may constitute a reportable transfer of value under the federal transparency law commonly known as the Sunshine Act. Therefore, if you are a licensed physician who incurs recruiting expenses as a result of interviewing with Pfizer that we pay or reimburse, your name, address and the amount of payments made currently will be reported to the government. If you have questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact your Talent Acquisition representative.

EEO & Employment Eligibility

Pfizer is committed to equal opportunity in the terms and conditions of employment for all employees and job applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, gender identity or gender expression, national origin, disability or veteran status. Pfizer also complies with all applicable national, state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements of the Immigration and Nationality Act and IRCA. Pfizer is an E-Verify employer. This position requires permanent work authorization in the United States.

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To learn more about acceptable and prohibited uses of AI during the recruitment process, please review our candidate AI-use guidelines available on [ _Pfizer Careers_](https://www.pfizer.com/about/careers/ai-use-guidelines).

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