Sr. Director, Engineering Lead in London

We are seeking a skilled People Leader with strong expertise in Engineering who will lead a team of Software Engineers to design, build, and maintain software systems that deliver business value. In this role, you will focus on code quality, architecture decisions, and reliable delivery while leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity. You will lead and grow a high‑performing team to deliver AI‑first digital capabilities and AI‑native platforms, shaping both the technology and the talent that will define our digital future. This role encompasses organization‑wide technical strategy, people management, and architectural direction. You will define strategic direction and be accountable for outcomes, shape organizational practices, maintain external industry visibility, and handle organizational‑scale complexity to create clarity from chaos.

Role Responsibilities

• Delivery: Drive delivery of the most critical technical initiatives and platforms, establish engineering delivery practices, and be the technical authority on high‑stakes projects.
• People: Lead a team of technical leaders, develop their expert skills, shape engineering talent strategy, build high‑performing teams, and own succession planning.
• Business: Shape technology‑driven business strategy and represent the technical perspective at the executive level.
• AI: Lead the design of AI‑augmented engineering workflows for your area, evaluate new AI tools, train engineers on effective AI usage, and balance speed with verification.
• Reliability: Establish SLOs/SLIs across teams, build resilient systems, lead reliability initiatives for your area, mentor engineers on reliability practices, and drive a reliability culture.
• Documentation: Establish documentation standards across teams in your area, build knowledge‑management systems, and mentor engineers on effective technical writing.
• Process: Drive process efficiency within your team, coordinate cross‑functional technical work, and lead retrospectives.

Role Behaviours

• Don’t Lose Your Curiosity: Shape organizational culture around curiosity and continuous learning; sponsor experimental initiatives across the organization; be recognized as a thought leader in problem discovery; influence industry practices around innovation and exploration.
• Set an example for your team: Consistently demonstrate a clear vision, positive energy, and exemplary expert actions that motivate direct reports to strive for their highest potential.
• Own the Outcome: Define organizational accountability standards focused on business impact; shape industry practices around outcome ownership in the AI era; sponsor transformational initiatives with full outcome accountability; be recognized externally for ownership culture leadership.
• Be Polymath Oriented: Enable cross‑disciplinary learning across the team; inspire the creation of holistic solutions spanning technical and business domains; embody the Renaissance Engineer ideal; translate specialized knowledge into accessible explanations; think like a business insider.
• Communicate with Precision: Enable spec‑driven development practices; mentor others on precise communication; span C‑level executives to frontline workers; drive clarity as a core value across your function; represent the organization externally.
• Think in Systems: Shape systems‑design practices across your function; enable chaos engineering experiments; influence cross‑team architecture decisions; create clarity from complexity; bridge technical systems with business processes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field with 12+ years of relevant experience.

Expert‑Level Skills

• Business Immersion: You are a recognized thought leader across business stakeholders. You influence business strategy, exemplify the business immersion mindset, and shape how engineering engages with the business.
• Data Integration: You lead the definition of data integration patterns and best practices; you enable the architecture of large‑scale data flows, solve the most complex integration challenges, and are the authority on enterprise data integration.
• Full‑Stack Development: You work comfortably in any language and rapidly acquire new skills, ensuring the same for your team of direct reports. You deliver production solutions in days, shape full‑stack practices, and exemplify polymathic engineering.
• Multi‑Audience Communication: You shape communication practices across teams. You represent engineering externally, communicate at board and executive level, and are recognized as an exceptional communicator who bridges any audience gap.
• Problem Discovery: You shape approaches to problem discovery. You transform ambiguous situations into clear opportunities, influence how teams engage with business problems, and are the go‑to person for the most undefined challenges.
• Engineering Delivery & Quality: You shape engineering delivery culture. You define standards for quality, reliability, and scalable delivery, and are recognized for driving consistent, high‑impact outcomes across complex initiatives.
• Stakeholder Management: You shape stakeholder practices and manage executive relationships, represent engineering at the highest levels, and are recognized for exceptional stakeholder partnerships.

People Manager Skills

• Leading the team: You set a clear direction, align people around shared goals, and ensure strong communication to drive collective success. You develop talent, foster collaboration, and create an environment where individuals feel empowered.
• Team Collaboration: You create a collaborative culture. You transform dysfunctional dynamics, build exceptional teams, and mentor others on collaboration excellence.
• Knowledge Management: You grow experts and lead knowledge‑management initiatives across your team, create knowledge systems and taxonomies, establish practices that make institutional knowledge persistent, and mentor others on knowledge sharing.
• Time Management & Deep Work: You protect focused time for complex work, balance multiple priorities without dropping balls, minimize context switching, and help others understand your team capacity.

Practitioner‑Level Skills

• AI Evaluation & Verification: You lead AI governance initiatives, create evaluation standards and checklists, and train engineers on rigorous AI verification. You design review processes for AI‑assisted work.
• AI Literacy: You guide AI adoption decisions, assess AI risks and benefits systematically, and train engineers on responsible AI usage. You design human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.
• AI‑Augmented Development: You optimize AI tool usage, train engineers on AI‑augmented workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance speed with verification rigor.
• Architecture & Design: You design complex multi‑component systems end‑to‑end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives, guide technical decisions for your area, and mentor engineers on architecture.
• Code Quality & Review: You establish and enforce quality standards across teams, mentor engineers on effective code review, ensure verification depth for AI‑assisted development, and drive testing strategies.
• Pattern Generalization: You lead pattern generalization initiatives, define criteria for when to generalize vs keep custom, and establish intake processes for scaling validated solutions. You mentor engineers on abstraction design.
• Service Management: You lead service management practices for multiple services, optimize service portfolios, balance service investments, and train engineers on service‑oriented thinking.
• Site Reliability Engineering: You define reliability standards, drive post‑incident improvements, design capacity‑planning processes, and mentor engineers on SRE practices.
• Technical Writing: You define documentation standards, create documentation systems and templates, train engineers on spec‑driven development, and ensure documentation quality.

Working‑Level Skills

• Cloud Platforms: You design cloud‑native solutions, manage infrastructure as code, implement security best practices, and make informed service selections. You troubleshoot cloud‑specific issues.
• Data Modeling: You create efficient data models, optimize queries, handle schema migrations safely, and choose appropriate storage technologies.
• DevOps & CI/CD: You build complete pipelines, manage infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), implement monitoring, and design deployment strategies.
• Lean Thinking & Flow: You optimize processes, measure and improve cycle time, remove bottlenecks, and deliver rapidly while maintaining quality.
• Technical Debt Management: You prioritize debt systematically, balance debt reduction with feature work, and make pragmatic trade‑offs.

Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities, including influencing and collaborating with peers, developing and coaching others, overseeing and guiding the work of colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

Work Location: Hybrid – On site strongly preferred. Remote locations will only be considered for internal candidates who are already designated remote.

Last Date to Apply: 7/28/2026

Annual base salary: $214,900.00 – $358,100.00. Eligible for Pfizer’s Global Performance Plan (bonus 22.5% of base salary) and share‑based long‑term incentive program. Benefits include 401(k) with matching contributions, paid vacation, holidays, personal days, caregiver/parental and medical leave, and health benefits (medical, prescription drug, dental, vision). Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

U.S. work visa sponsorship: (TN, O‑1, H‑1B, etc.) is not available for this role now or in the future.

EEO & Employment Eligibility: Pfizer is committed to equal opportunity in employment for all employees and job applicants irrespective of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability or veteran status. Pfizer complies with applicable laws governing nondiscrimination, work authorization, and employment eligibility verification. Pfizer is an E‑Verify employer. Permanent work authorization in the United States is required.