Associate Director, Data Engineer
AstraZeneca1 day ago
Barcelona, SpainStaff+
Responsibilities
- Prototype, design, develop, deploy, and maintain modular, configurable data solutions for complex end-to-end R&D workflows.
- Translate scientific and business requirements into technical designs, implementation plans, and reusable capabilities.
- Move solutions from prototype to production with operational readiness, lifecycle management, monitoring, observability, documentation, and continuous improvement.
- Evaluate trade-offs involving scalability, maintainability, security, cost, performance, and reuse, and advise on pragmatic technical approaches.
- Plan and track delivery, manage risks and dependencies, provide stakeholder updates, and coordinate internal contributors and outsourced partners.
- Collaborate with solution architects, data engineers, semantic modellers, and other specialists to deliver robust and supportable products.
- Mentor junior colleagues and contribute to technical learning and continuous improvement.
- Troubleshoot issues affecting performance, data flows, metadata integrity, and production reliability.
- Implement FAIR+T principles, including traceability, discoverability, data quality, metadata integrity, and trustworthy data use.
- Assess AI-assisted development, automation, and agent-based approaches for engineering and data-management workflows.
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining data and software solutions for complex business, scientific, or operational workflows.
- Strong programming experience in Python and working knowledge of other relevant programming languages.
- Practical experience developing and deploying solutions using AWS or other cloud services, including familiarity with Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS IAM or equivalents.
- Experience with relational databases and data integration or processing workflows.
- Ability to design modular, configurable, maintainable, and reusable solutions and translate business or scientific needs into technical requirements.
- Experience planning and delivering technical work in an agile environment, including progress tracking, risk and dependency management, and stakeholder reporting.
- Ability to explain technical trade-offs involving scalability, maintainability, security, cost, performance, and reuse.
- Understanding of, or strong interest in, data quality, metadata, and FAIR principles.
- Interest in AI-assisted development, automation, and agent-based solutions for engineering productivity and data-management workflows.
- Desirable experience with non-relational databases, including graph, document, key-value, or analytical databases.
- Desirable experience with metadata management, semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SHACL, and SPARQL, data governance, or FAIR data practices.
- Interest in or experience with pharmaceutical R&D, pre-clinical research, laboratory workflows, or scientific data.
- Experience in regulated, privacy-sensitive, or otherwise controlled environments is desirable.
- Experience mentoring colleagues, coordinating technical delivery through influence, or applying AI agents and automation to scientific, data-management, or software-development workflows is desirable.
Benefits
- In-office role in Barcelona, Spain, with a minimum of three days per week on-site; remote or travel flexibility is not available.
- Opportunity to work with deep specialists and diverse partners on enterprise-scale pre-clinical research and data initiatives.
- Access to modern platforms, data and machine-learning methods, and supportive technical communities.
- Inclusive workplace focused on diversity, equality of opportunity, curiosity, constructive challenge, and collaboration.
About AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures, and commercializes prescription medicines for patients and healthcare systems. Its portfolio spans oncology, cardiovascular, renal and metabolism, respiratory and immunology, and rare diseases (expanded by the 2021 acquisition of Alexion). Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Cambridge, UK, it is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, generating revenue primarily from drug sales and partnerships.