Senior Director, Applied AI - US Commercial

About this role

ROLE SUMMARY

The Senior Director, Applied AI is a system-level AI and architecture leader who shapes enterprise and domain-level direction by connecting technological possibility to business value, operating-model design, and measurable outcomes. You determine what should be built and why it matters, how it should be governed, and how to keep solutions coherent at scale — working through strategic influence, architectural direction, standards, and decision frameworks. You are also a builder. You stay close enough to the technology to keep your judgment credible — architecting and reviewing the hardest technical decisions, and setting the engineering bar others meet. And you lead a mixed team of full-time engineers, contractors, and vendor partners whose work you scope, direct, and hold to Pfizer's quality and security standards. As part of Pfizer's commercial AI organization, you help deliver on Pfizer's ambition to be the most AI-forward company — ensuring AI investments translate into coherent, enterprise-wide value rather than disconnected local solutions.

Why This Role Matters Pfizer's purpose — breakthroughs that change patients' lives — has always depended on the company's willingness to transform how it works, not only what it discovers. Being the most AI-forward company, and reinventing how we work from end to end, is the next chapter in that story. Realizing that ambition depends on doing AI coherently and at scale, not as a set of disconnected efforts. This role ensures the organization builds AI that is sound, reusable, and aligned — preventing fragmentation and technical debt while staying technical enough to know whether what is proposed is actually buildable. You are responsible for ensuring AI investments produce real outcomes, reusable capabilities, and a unified direction.

Candidate Profile You are a system thinker and transformation shaper, comfortable under ambiguity and at enterprise scale, who has kept your hands on the technology. You combine strong technical judgment and current hands-on ability with business acumen, framing AI not as a technology initiative but as a driver of operational and strategic transformation. You are equally effective influencing senior executives, guiding technical leaders, and directing the engineers, contractors, and vendors who do the build.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

1)  Enterprise Strategy & Transformation   — Shape and evolve enterprise or domain-level AI strategy, grounded in clear business value and transformation outcomes. Connect AI initiatives explicitly to measurable impact, and influence leadership on where AI should be applied and how it should reshape processes and operating models. 2)  System-Level Architecture & Operating-Model Design   — Design and evolve enterprise AI operating models, the target technology landscape, and the relationships between platforms, capabilities, and embedded solutions. Create decision frameworks and architectural principles that drive consistent decisions across teams. 3)  Portfolio & Trade-off Leadership   — Drive portfolio-level architectural decisions across initiatives, platforms, and reusable capabilities. Balance value vs. cost, speed vs. governance, standardization vs. flexibility, and innovation vs. reliability, steering toward enterprise reuse and away from duplication. 4)  Standards, Governance & Enterprise Coherence   — Define and steward “what good looks like” across AI architecture, solution design, and operational execution — quality, evaluation and governance, integration patterns, reuse and modularity. Actively prevent fragmentation, architectural drift, and systemic technical debt. 5)  Hands-on Technical Leadership   — Stay hands-on where it matters — architecture and code review with modern AI and agent frameworks — to validate emerging technology, de-risk decisions, and keep direction grounded in what is buildable. You lead from the front on the hardest problems rather than directing from a distance. 6)  Team, Vendor & Delivery Leadership   — Lead a mixed team of full-time engineers, contractors, and vendor partners across one or more initiatives. Scope and direct vendor work, set quality and security standards, manage performance and spend, and ensure critical capability and IP stay with Pfizer. Mentor Directors and engineers and raise the technical bar across the group. 7)  External Signal Integration & Thought Leadership   — Continuously assess emerging technologies, the vendor landscape, industry trends, and research. Translate signal into practical, enterprise-relevant implications, distinguish hype from viable solutions, and act as an internal and external thought leader.

Technical Profile The Senior Director is defined not by being the deepest specialist in every area, but by the ability to synthesize across them — with credible, current hands-on ability in a subset. Expected breadth across: agentic systems and LLMs; traditional AI/ML and neural networks; data and business analytics and data architecture; AI-readiness of data and retrieval architecture; solution-design architecture; tracing, monitoring and observability; and AI guardrails and governance. The differentiator is cross-domain synthesis and orchestration, paired with enough hands-on depth to lead the build.

QUALIFICATIONS

Basic Qualifications • 12+ years in AI, data, or software architecture, with significant experience at enterprise or multi-domain scale. • Proven ability to shape enterprise or domain-level strategy and architecture direction, tied to measurable business outcomes. • Current hands-on technical proficiency — able to read, write, build, and review code with modern AI / agent frameworks. • Experience leading full-time engineers, contractors, and vendor partners to deliver production-grade systems. • Strong experience in operating-model design, governance frameworks, and architectural standardization. • Demonstrated ability to influence senior executive stakeholders. • Deep understanding ac

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