Senior Consultant - Learning Tech - Work Stream Lead

JOB TITLE : SENIOR CONSULTANT

CAREER LEVEL: D2

Leverage technology to impact patients and ultimately save lives

Do you have expertise in, and passion for, information technology? Would you like to apply your expertise to impact the IT strategy in a company that follows the science and turns ideas into life changing medicines? If so, AstraZeneca might be the one for you!

ABOUT ASTRAZENECA

AstraZeneca is a global, science-led, patient-focused biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the world’s most serious disease. But we’re more than one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. At AstraZeneca we’re dedicated to being a Great Place to Work.

ABOUT ROLE

Enabling Units IT actively partners with business partners to deliver cutting-edge IT capabilities to fulfil AstraZeneca’s bold ambition of delivering life changing therapies to patients. Our ambition is to provide best-in-class expertise and leadership in technological solutions, BI Analytics and Information Delivery that empowers our Enabling colleagues in the field and accelerates and improves strategic decision-making for a diverse range of partners. The team engages with some of the most exciting business areas within AstraZeneca and is faced with solving for a variety of complex business and IT challenges.

The Enabling Units IT Platform portfolios are a unique mixture of in-house developed, Commercial Off the Shelf Software (COTS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

Working alongside the Platform Lead, Delivery Lead, Software Engineers, Support Analysts, Architects and other IT and business platform partners, the Workstream Lead will manage a team of Platform Team members for the support of Global IT systems. The Workstream Lead needs a deep understanding of technology, architecture and design along with experience in Service Management, using Agile methodology and DevOps principles. The Workstream Lead should be passionate about software development and also be willing to lead, coach and enable wider teams to grow and expand their software delivery capabilities and skills.

This is an outstanding opportunity for a seasoned manager to advance modern software development practices within our team (DevOps/CI/CD/AI/ML, automated testing), and building bespoke integration solutions which will accelerate AstraZeneca’s ability to run and transform a critical business platform.

The role and core platform accountabilities

• Manages a Workstream for a core Learning capability from end to end using Agile methodology and DevOps principles

• Ensure that the workstream’s objectives and desired outcomes, benefits, measurements and timelines are in line with business objectives and needs

• Establish and manage the workstream scope, resources in respect of capacity planning, deliverables and timelines, with input from the Platform Lead & Delivery Lead

• Working within the EUIT Release and System Change framework to lead the agile delivery of releases, developing release and resource management plans.

• Ability to calmly handle incidents, problems and change on critical systems in accordance with the AZ ITSM enterprise framework

• Participate in the Acceptance to Service (ATS) process of new services into the platform alongside Platform Lead

• Task management & allocation in respect to demand/project activities within the workstream using Jira Confluence

• Ensures requirements are understood, developed, tested, and delivered to specification in accordance to controls in respect of compliance (GxP)

• Responsible for the Configuration data being accurate and maintained on the AZ CI tool throughout the lifecycle of the application

• Solve complex technical problems and work alongside complementary delivery platforms while aligning solutions with cross portfolio data strategies and target architecture

• Estimation, implementation and delivery of features and functional enhancements within the platform that can support the improvement in value, revenue, profitability and user satisfaction

• Perform SCRUM Master role for backlog/sprint management and prioritization of the backlog

• Collaborate with Platform Lead & Delivery Lead in Architecture team engagement for major changes and adjustments to platform blueprint and landscape

• Ensure modern, controlled and regulated agile software development practices and a great engineering culture

• Promote and embed CI/CD to improve the software development process and transform the IT system estate into an ecosystem that delivers great user experiences and excellent IT service to the business

• Evangelize the adoption of DevOps tools and capabilities within the business and IT community

• Accountability for ensuring seamless service delivery, platform operational health and prioritisation of break-fix activities

• Ability to calmly handle incidents, problems and change on critical systems in accordance with the AZ ITSM enterprise framework

• Proactively monitor production performance to help guide future development and opportunities, ensuring the platform is scalable and resilient for peak demands

• Maintaining up to date platform documentation and knowledge articles

• Improving existing applications and ensuring that new applications are developed and implemented in alignment with collaborative cross IT Platform ways of working and business requirements

• Ensures the team prioritises bandwidth becomes cross functional and technically upskilled

• Add something in about identification and management of risks

• Something about dependencies and collaboration needed across the platform workstreams

• Something about stakeholder management either in here or in the capabilities section below

• Think we should add something in about line management ( I know it’s mentioned in the blurb at the top but that is also a key accountability / capability for the role)

• Is there something we should put in about working with vendors?

Qualifications, skills, capabilities and experience:

• Degree level education (Information Technology or similar)

• 5+ Years of Experience working in service management & management technical lead roles for IT Support within global teams, delivering and supporting solutions

• Overall 10+ years of hands on software development experience having worked in and developed a team of high performing software engineers responsible for multiple products, particularly a portfolio environment

• Experience working in a globally distributed team managing a 10 to 15 member team

• Understanding of software engineering CI/CD processes, with experience in the design and implementation of applications build, release, deployment, containerization and configuration control management

• Experience working with JIRA, Service Now and Automated Testing tools (Jenkins, Bamboo, JIRA, Confluence, CI CD tools - Ansible, etc)

• Technology stack (.NET, Java, Oracle ADF, Springboot, eDiscovery tools, Elastic Search, Python, & CI/CD DevOps tools, AI capabilities – RPA, Intelligent Automation, Hyper Automation, NLP and Machine Learning)

• Experience in a validated environment with operational awareness of GxP and SOx

• Supporting responsibility for decommission process and execution throughout the technology stack

• Technically competent and curious with a passion to explore, iterate, fail, and learn

• Experience of working in Agile teams using SCRUM and SAFe methodologies

• Experience with Monitoring tools like Splunk, AppDynamics, Aternity

• Customer satisfaction focus with success measured by how well your team is delivering against requirements

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

• Ability to work independently and handle complex, ambiguous situations, solve complex technical problems and work alongside complementary delivery platforms while aligning solutions with data strategies

WHY JOIN US ?

We’re a network of high-reaching self-starters who contribute to something far bigger. We enable AstraZeneca to perform at its peak by delivering premier technology and data solutions.

We’re not afraid to take ownership and run with it. Empowered with unrivalled freedom. Put simply, it’s because we make a significant impact. Everything we do matters.

SO, WHAT’S NEXT?

Are you already envisioning yourself joining our team? Good, because we’d love to hear from you! Click the link to apply and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can.

WHERE CAN I FIND OUT MORE?

Our Social Media, Follow AstraZeneca on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/1603/

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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 authorisation and employment eligibility verification requirements.