Associate Director, Data Engineering Lead

Role Description

Ready to build the foundation that powers trusted, AI-ready data at scale? As Associate Director, Data Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in shaping how enterprise data is engineered, governed, and delivered across Novartis. Working at the intersection of data platforms, governance, and innovation, you will establish the standards, controls, and engineering capabilities that enable reliable, compliant, and high-quality data products. This is an exciting opportunity to influence enterprise-wide data strategy, drive modern DataOps practices, and help accelerate data-driven decision making that ultimately supports better outcomes for patients worldwide.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and enforce enterprise standards for data engineering, pipeline reliability, and production controls.
• Design and oversee scalable, governed data pipelines supporting critical business and data domains.
• Lead the enterprise data contract lifecycle, including review, approval, governance, and enforcement.
• Implement data observability capabilities across monitoring, anomaly detection, service levels, and operational alerting.
• Establish controls that ensure critical data elements remain traceable, validated, and protected.
• Develop safeguards that prevent incomplete, inaccurate, or non-compliant data from reaching downstream systems.
• Partner with data modeling teams to align engineering implementation with approved enterprise data models.
• Collaborate across governance, privacy, architecture, and platform teams to enable compliant data delivery.
• Drive automation for deployment, validation, metadata capture, lineage generation, testing, and reporting.
• Monitor operational performance and lead resolution of pipeline, contract, and data reliability issues.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Data Management, Engineering, Analytics, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data governance, data architecture, data product management, or enterprise data platform delivery.
• Experience designing, building, or governing enterprise data pipelines, data products, data platforms, or data integration capabilities.
• Direct experience with data contracts, schema validation, data pipeline monitoring, data observability, or data product certification.
• Experience working in complex enterprise environments with multiple data producers, consumers, vendors, platforms, and governance stakeholders.

Desirable Requirements

• Advanced degree or relevant cloud, data engineering, data management, or architecture certification.
• Experience supporting regulated, privacy-sensitive, or compliance-driven data environments.

Salary Range

$152,600.00 - $283,400.00

Benefits

• Performance-based cash incentive.
• Eligibility for annual equity awards (depending on the level of the role).
• Comprehensive benefits package including health, life and disability benefits.
• 401(k) with company contribution and match.
• Generous time off package including vacation, personal days, holidays, and other leaves.

EEO Statement

The Novartis Group of Companies are Equal Opportunity Employers. We do not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

Accessibility and Reasonable Accommodations

The Novartis Group of Companies are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, or to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an e-mail to View email address on us.fitly.work or call View phone number on us.fitly.work and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Please include the job requisition number in your message.