Executive Director, Global Cloud & Hosting Platforms

• Proventrackrecord to establish and deliver a multi-year strategy for hybrid/multi-cloud and hosting services. The strategy supports business priorities such as R&D, AI, manufacturing continuity, cost control, and regulatory compliance. ance.
• Track record establishing target architectures and roadmaps for public cloud landing zones and standardized patterns, private cloud and virtualization modernization, on-premises compute platforms, and storage modernization including backup and data restoration strategies.
• Demonstrated experience driving cloud adoption via workload rationalization, placement standards, reference architectures, and migration factories, including application and data modernization.
• Expertise in delivering enterprise-grade systems for processing power and data management in AI/ML and advanced analytics. These systems include GPU-enabled platforms and scalable storage for training and inference.
• Experience delivering secure environments for sensitive R&D, patient, and regulated data aligned to privacy, residency, and quality requirements.
• Ability to integrate platform services with MLOps toolchains (CI/CD, model registry, monitoring) and enterprise observability.
• Experience supporting emerging AI patterns such as LLM inference hosting, vector search, and high-throughput data pipelines with compliant architectures, automated controls, and operational readiness.
• Proven partnership with Data and AI leadership to operationalize governance, cost controls, and responsible use requirements for AI workloads.
• Ownership of HPC strategy and operations across on-premises and cloud HPC, enabling simulation, modeling, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and data-intensive research.
• Demonstrated capability to drive HPC performance, scalability, throughput, and queue optimization while maintaining security, compliance, and reproducibility, and to lead modern HPC patterns including elastic burst-to-cloud, containerized workflows, GPU acceleration, and optimized high-throughput storage.
• Experience delivering global storage platforms with high availability, performance, data lifecycle management, and budget-conscious operations (tiering, archiving, data reduction).
• Ownership of backup, restore, disaster recovery, and cyber incident restoration capabilities aligned to business impact analyses and RTO/RPO requirements, and effective response to ransomware and major incidents in partnership with Cybersecurity.
• Manage worldwide 24x7 operations for cloud and hosting platforms. This includes improving availability, reducing incidents, speeding recovery, managing capacity and performance, standardizing oversight and diagnostics, and prioritizing automation.
• End-to-end lifecycle management experience including patching, platform currency, configuration compliance, and hardware refresh, with mature SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, runbooks, blameless postmortems, continuous improvement).
• Strong governance, risk, and compliance acumen ensuring platforms meet regulatory, quality, and internal control requirements (including GxP), with policy-as-code, audit-ready evidence, focused changemanagement, and robust third-party/vendor assurance.
• Financial leadership owning platform budgets and operationalizing FinOps for cloud consumption (showback/chargeback, unit economics, rightsizing, commitments/reservations, forecast accuracy), with a record of optimizing vendor contracts and licensing and building investment cases.
• Executive leadership of global engineering and operations teams, encouragingacultureof protection, responsibility, mechanization, and ongoing development. Act asatrusted partner to senior collaborators across R&D, Manufacturing, Commercial, and Corporate functions.

• Experience in highly regulated industries with direct exposure to quality audits and validation, including GxP contexts.
• Background leading major platform transformations that combine on-premises modernization with scaled public cloud adoption using migration factories.
• Practical knowledge of AI governance frameworks, responsible AI controls, and cost optimization for GPU-intensive workloads.
• Hands-on familiarity with HPC schedulers, containerized scientific workflows, and GPU acceleration trade-offs for diverse research workloads.
• Proven leadership through significant incidents and cyber recovery events, with emphasis on immutable backup designs and segmentation strategies.
• Public cloud and FinOps certifications and experience establishing policy-as-code and SRE frameworks at enterprise scale.
• Track record influencing at C-suite level, simplifying sophisticated platform decisions into clear business outcomes and economic models.

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.