When our values align, there's no limit to what we can achieve.
At Parexel, we all share the same goal - to improve the world's health. From clinical trials to regulatory, consulting, and market access, every clinical development solution we provide is underpinned by something special - a deep conviction in what we do.
Each of us, no matter what we do at Parexel, contributes to the development of a therapy that ultimately will benefit a patient. We take our work personally, we do it with empathy and we're committed to making a difference.
Parexel is in the business of improving the world’s health. We do this by providing a suite of biopharmaceutical services that help clients across the globe transform scientific discoveries into new treatments. We believe in our values, Patients First, Quality, Respect, Empowerment & Accountability.
This role will work within our innovative Data & Technology group that continues to evolve to meet business needs, fuel Parexel's growth and enable improved support for stakeholders, including customers and ultimately patients, who will benefit from Parexel's integrated processes and systems.
This role can be based in the UK, Poland or Romania and can be fully home based and remote working anywhere in any of these locations only.
As the Director, Data Engineering - RWD is a domain-aligned technical execution leader with predominant experience in life sciences, clinical research, and Real-World Data, responsible for orchestrating and driving delivery across Data Ingestion, Data Engineering, and Data Distribution for RWD and related enterprise data products.
This is a strong individual contributor role with no direct line management authority, however it requires strong matrixed leadership, technical credibility, and influence across data engineering, Clinical Operations, Commercial, and broader business stakeholders to ensure that life sciences data priorities are translated into executable plans and delivered with consistency, transparency, regulatory awareness, and measurable impact.
You will partner with Data and Technology, the Data and Analytics CoE, Clinical Operations, Commercial, business domain stakeholders, platform teams, governance partners, and delivery teams to translate life sciences and Real-World Data needs into executable engineering priorities.
You will lead intake management, roadmap shaping, prioritization, dependency management, stakeholder alignment, delivery governance, and value tracking, while establishing clear ownership, managing dependencies, coordinating delivery sequencing, and ensuring trusted, high-quality, governed, and reusable data assets are available for analytics, AI enablement, operational reporting, regulatory-aligned use cases, and sponsor-facing distribution.
What You'll Lead:
RWD Data Domain Engineering & Orchestration
- Act as the domain-aligned engineering coordination / orchestration lead for Real-World Data in a life sciences context, connecting clinical research, operational, and commercial priorities to executable plans across ingestion, transformation, curation, and distribution.
- Drive delivery across Data Ingestion, Data Engineering, and Data Distribution teams, ensuring clear scope, sequencing, dependency management, and execution follow-through.
- Provide technical leadership for scalable RWD pipelines, lakehouse design, architecture, data quality controls, metadata practices, and reusable data product patterns.
Matrixed Execution Leadership & Cross-Functional Orchestration
- Serve as the primary matrixed coordination point between RWD stakeholders, Clinical Operations, Commercial, life sciences business domain owners, architects, engineers, governance teams, analytics teams, and downstream consumers.
- Lead intake, prioritization, roadmap shaping, delivery planning, and operating cadence for RWD data initiatives, balancing urgency, capacity, quality, risk, compliance, and business value.
- Influence execution across teams without direct authority by building shared understanding, clarifying tradeoffs, resolving blockers, and driving commitment to agreed outcomes.
Technical Leadership, Team Enablement & Delivery Discipline
- Coordinate across data engineering teams and stakeholders to align expectations for technical quality, execution discipline, stakeholder engagement, and delivery accountability.
- Champion capability development in cloud data engineering, Azure Databricks, lakehouse architecture, CI/CD, SQL, Python, data observability, governance, and secure data distribution.
- Track delivered outputs against planned KPIs and expected value measures to ensure the data capability delivered the intended business, operational, clinical, and stakeholder outcomes.
What We're Looking For:
Skills:
- Deep technical expertise in enterprise data engineering, including ingestion patterns, transformation frameworks, lakehouse architecture, medallion design, data quality, metadata management, and operational support.
- Strong matrixed leadership and orchestration skills, with demonstrated ability to influence and align technical/data engineering, Clinical Operations, Commercial, governance, analytics, and business stakeholders without relying on direct reporting relationships.
- Predominant experience with life sciences data environments, including Real-World Data, clinical research data, healthcare data, regulated data environments, GxP expectations, privacy controls, sponsor/client needs, and data governance.
- Strong business stakeholder engagement skills, with experience aligning technology capabilities to clinical, operational, commercial, and sponsor-facing outcomes
- Hands-on knowledge of cloud data platforms and engineering tools, particularly Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake, SQL, Python, Spark, APIs, orchestration frameworks, CI/CD, and monitoring practices.
- Ability to apply product- and program-management discipline, structured delivery discipline, and coordination/orchestration discipline to data engineering delivery, including intake management, roadmap development, backlog shaping, prioritization, dependency management, delivery tracking, success measures, and stakeholder-ready communications.
- Proven ability to manage cross-team dependencies, delivery risks, prioritization tradeoffs, capacity constraints, and competing stakeholder expectations in a matrixed organization.
Knowledge and Experience
- Strong advanced level experience of IT, data, analytics, or technology, with a predominant focus on life sciences, clinical research, healthcare data, RWD, or regulated data environments, including significant hands-on leadership in enterprise data engineering, integration, cloud platforms, and data delivery.
- Previous high level experience leading complex data engineering, data delivery, or analytics platform initiatives in life sciences, clinical research, healthcare, or RWD environments through matrixed leadership, including coordination across ingestion, engineering, distribution, Clinical Operations, Commercial, governance, analytics, and business stakeholders.
- Strong previous technical leadership or matrixed delivery leadership experience, including:
- Successfully developing and implementing applications in new computing architecture environments using innovative technologies.
- Influencing technical and business teams across multiple project lifecycle phases; cross-functional leadership across technical, clinical, commercial, governance, and analytics stakeholders is highly desirable.
- Leading resources to achieve goals across multiple projects.
- Developing efficient and effective solutions to complex business challenges.
- Experience working directly with business and operational stakeholders to translate business needs into technology priorities, delivery plans, success measures, and realized outcomes.
- Experience in life sciences, clinical research, healthcare, RWD, or regulated data environments is expected; experience with clinical trial operations, sponsor-facing data delivery, regulatory-aware analytics, or commercial life sciences data is strongly preferred.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field (required)
In return we will be able to offer you a structured career pathway and encouragement to develop within the role including awareness and understanding of the industry. You will be well supported and in return for your hard work you will be rewarded with a competitive base salary, bonus, car allowance and holiday as well as other leading benefits you would expect with a top company in the CRO Industry.
Apply today to begin your Parexel journey!
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Skills Required
- 12+ years of IT experience developing, implementing, and maintaining large-scale enterprise integration services and platforms
- Exposure to real-world data in the clinical or medical space
- 8+ years leading teams in data delivery management and execution
- At least 6 years of management experience
- Experience developing and implementing applications in new computing architecture environments
- Experience managing technical personnel across multiple project lifecycle phases
- Experience managing financial resources across multiple projects
- Experience developing solutions to complex business challenges
- Extensive experience implementing and supporting enterprise data initiatives on cloud platforms
- Expertise with Azure Databricks
- Experience with medallion architecture-based data lake implementations
- Advanced proficiency in SQL querying and query tuning
- Proficiency in modern data management and data-sharing tools, programming languages, relational databases, data transformation, and development frameworks
- Deep understanding of architectural best practices, application design, and estimation processes
- Thorough knowledge of application architectures and enterprise application ecosystems
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field
- Experience with GxP regulations in a life sciences environment
Parexel Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Parexel and has not been reviewed or approved by Parexel.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as comprehensive, including medical, dental, vision, HSA/FSA options, and company-paid disability insurance. Descriptions often portray the package as strong or “top notch,” adding meaningful value.
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Retirement Support — Retirement offerings include a 401(k) with company matching and, in some regions, generous pension contributions. Core financial protections are emphasized as a solid part of the total rewards.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time-off programs include ample PTO or flexible/unlimited RTO alongside flexible schedules and remote/hybrid options. Work-life balance support from managers is highlighted as a practical advantage.
Parexel Insights
What We Do
Parexel is among the world’s largest clinical research organizations (CROs), providing the full range of Phase I to IV clinical development services to help life-saving treatments reach patients faster. Leveraging the breadth of our clinical, regulatory and therapeutic expertise, our team of more than 21,000 global professionals collaborates with biopharmaceutical leaders, emerging innovators and sites to design and deliver clinical trials with patients in mind, increasing access and participation to make clinical research a care option for anyone, anywhere. Our depth of industry knowledge and strong track record gained over the past 40 years is moving the industry forward and advancing clinical research in healthcare’s most complex areas, while our innovation ecosystem offers the best solutions to make every phase of the clinical trial process more efficient. With the people, insight and focus on operational excellence, we work With HeartTM every day to treat patients with dignity and continuously learn from their experiences, so every trial makes a difference. For more information, visit parexel.com. Community Guidelines Because Parexel’s social media channels are open to the general public and employees, we are not responsible for views expressed other than our own. However, we do not tolerate posts that are: • Abusive, harassing or threatening to others. • Defamatory, offensive, obscene, vulgar or depicting violence. • Hateful targeting by race/ethnicity, age, color, creed, religion, gender, sexual preference or orientation, nationality or political beliefs. • Sexually explicit or pornographic. • Fraudulent, deceptive, libelous, misleading or unlawful. • Referencing criminal or illegal activity. • Spamming. We reserve the right to remove any comments that do not adhere to our guidelines as well as report users who violate the rules of our page.
