Head of Data & BI Platform Engineering
About the role
The Head of Data & BI Platform Engineering owns Pfizer's enterprise data and business intelligence platform layer. This encompasses the platforms on which Pfizer's structured and semi-structured data is stored, processed, transformed, and visualized, including the organization's core data warehousing and lake platforms (such as Snowflake and Databricks), data integration and transformation tools (such as Alteryx and Mulesoft), and enterprise BI and visualization platforms (such as Tableau, Power BI, and Spotfire).
Responsibilities
Define and own the Data & BI platform strategy and multi-year roadmap, ensuring platform investments are aligned to the needs of federated AI and analytics teams across Pfizer.
Lead, develop, and grow a team of engineers and platform specialists across Platform Operations, Platform Development, and Data Reliability pods.
Establish and maintain product-minded ownership of the platform portfolio with roadmap priorities driven by user needs, validated through regular engagement with platform consumers.
Own the vendor relationships and licensing strategy for the data and BI platform portfolio, including contract management, performance governance, and technology evaluation.
Partner with the Head of AI Ready Data to ensure platform infrastructure and data governance standards are tightly integrated, the platform must serve AI-ready data, not just available data.
Oversee the design, build, and operation of enterprise data pipelines, warehouse/lakehouse environments, and BI infrastructure at scale.
Define and publish platform SLAs covering availability, data freshness, query performance, and pipeline reliability and hold the team accountable to them.
Drive platform cost transparency and FinOps practices ensuring compute and storage costs are visible, attributed, and continuously optimized.
Ensure all platforms meet Pfizer's enterprise security, privacy, and regulatory compliance requirements, in partnership with the CISO organization and Trusted AI team.
Serve as the primary platform interface for federated AI and analytics teams across Pfizer, proactively embedding platform support and enabling self-service access.
Partner with Enterprise Architecture and existing Pfizer Digital & Technology data teams to ensure the CoE platform extends and modernizes existing data infrastructure investments rather than duplicating them.
Contribute to the AI & Data Guild network, enabling cross-functional awareness of platform capabilities, best practices, and available data assets.
Report regularly to the Chief AI and Data Officer on platform health, SLA performance, adoption metrics, and investment priorities.
Requirements
Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline; or equivalent years of experience.
15+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or enterprise analytics infrastructure, with a minimum of 5 years in a senior engineering leadership role.
Demonstrated hands-on experience administering and scaling enterprise data warehousing or lakehouse platforms at scale, including at least one of the following: Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse.
Proven experience managing enterprise BI and visualization platforms (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, or Spotfire), including governance, performance, and adoption programs.
Experience with data integration and pipeline tooling (e.g., Alteryx, dbt, Informatica, Fivetran, or equivalent) in a large enterprise context.
Proven track record of leading platform teams with an SLA-driven, product-minded operating model with documented outcomes in platform reliability, cost efficiency, and user adoption.
Strong command of data catalog, metadata management, data lineage, and data quality frameworks in enterprise environments.
Experience establishing platform governance in regulated industries, including data privacy controls, access management, and audit trail requirements.
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in a federated organizational model — driving adoption through value delivery and user experience, not mandate.
Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to translate platform strategy and technical trade-offs for both technical teams and executive stakeholders.
Qualifications
Breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.
Skills
Experience in the biopharmaceutical, life sciences, or healthcare sector, with familiarity with GxP data requirements, HIPAA, and FDA data integrity expectations.
Experience supporting AI and machine learning workflows as a data platform consumer understanding of feature engineering pipelines, training data requirements, and model data dependencies.
Familiarity with semantic layer tools (e.g., dbt metrics layer, Looker LookML, AtScale) and governed metric management.
Experience operating within or alongside a Center of Excellence or shared services model in a large, matrixed organization.
Working knowledge of FinOps practices for cloud data platform cost governance.
Experience with modern data stack architectures including data mesh, data lakehouse, and medallion architecture patterns.
Benefits
Comprehensive and generous benefits and programs to help our colleagues lead healthy lives and to support each of life’s moments. Benefits offered include a 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution, paid vacation, holiday and personal days, paid caregiver/parental and medical leave, and health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage.