Senior Director, Competitive Intelligence Data Science - Discovery and Innovation

Key Skills

Java Programming, Python Programming, SQL, Oncology

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced Data Science director to join our Oncology Competitive Intelligence (CI) team within Oncology R&D. This role will be part of a multi-functional agile team and will provide strategic and technical leadership in building predictive and prescriptive analytic solutions to support AZ’s oncology strategy, specifically in the early development areas involving antibody drug conjugates, Cell therapy, T-cell engagers and other novel platforms. The candidate needs to be a dependable teammate with strong hands-on analytics experience, drive, and curiosity. You know how to rise above the numbers and explain the essential insights to users at all levels including R&D Scientists, business professionals, analysts, IT development teams and senior executives. You simplify and distill business complexity into testable hypotheses and scalable solutions. While you are well versed in a plethora of advanced modelling techniques, you are able to identify the technique optimal for the task at hand based on the business requirements, your knowledge of the data and the technique’s assumptions, interpretability and robustness. You ask good questions, are continually learning as well as finding opportunities to share knowledge with others.

The CI Data Science Senior Director will oversee a varied and changing portfolio of data projects, playing a key leadership role alongside other functional stakeholders in discovery, translational and strategy teams to apply data science methods to inform tumor strategy. This role will be involved in stakeholder engagement and management, solution design discussions, leadership, mentoring and service engagement with the Oncology R&D competitive intelligence and strategy leads. This role will track and plan incorporation of new data science technology to the business processes within Competitive Intelligence.

You will join a team that has a history of delivering key insights to senior decision makers. We have ongoing work that is looking at optimizing the data processes and analysis that goes into creating and delivering these key insights. This role will be involved in projects that work across multiple delivery streams at any one time to help deliver these key insights.

What will you work on

• Drive the data cycle value chain for Oncology Competitive Intelligence from identification and decomposition of business problems, identification of data sources to solve the business problem, and drive usage of insights to advance strategy
• Lead and apply emerging knowledge from congresses, newsflow, publications, financial activity (e.g., deals) and awareness in trends, standard methodology and new developments in analytics and data science to influence functional practices within R&D
• Partner with oncology strategy, clinical and product leads to help answer key questions in early and late development
• Delivery of information models designed to drive the interrogation of datasets for insights in scientific and business application areas. These solutions include the application of specialized approaches in classification, regression, clustering, NLP, image analysis, knowledge graphs and/or other techniques. 
• Using domain-specific understanding, translate unstructured, complex business problems into the appropriate data problem, model and analytical solutions across multiple projects and closely partner with scientistis and technology developers to deliver the solution
• Oversee the researching and developing of predictive models and computational methods to guide and influence decision-making outcomes for investments in early and late oncology clinical programs
• Develop effective relationships with business and clinical units to ensure utilization and value of the information resources developed by the data science team in multiple projects.
• Responsible for advanced data science expertise to multiple cross-functional projects and drive delivery of complex data science solutions that drive value to AstraZeneca
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• Collaborates across the AstraZeneca Data and AI community to develop best practices and cross functional opportunities that drive value
• Oversight of partnerships with multiple third parties, academic or outsourced partners to shape and drive project outcomes and knowledge building across the organization
• Support the adoption of analytic products through effective storytelling and collaboration with key partners.
• Share knowledge with others on the team; continue to adapt or develop new methods and learn new software packages as available in the literature and recent publications.

Essential Qualifications:

• Advanced quantitative degree (Computational biology, Informatics, Business analytics, Statistics, Operations Research, Computer Science or related field) with at least 5 years of related industry experience or Bachelor’s degree and 7-12 years related industry experience.

Desirable for the role:

• Deep understanding of Oncology drug targets, drug development, clinical trials, Pharma portfolio and competitive intelligence