Strategic Technology Initiatives Lead

Description:

The role is accountable for connecting the technical strategy of individual initiatives into one coherent direction, ensuring each program reinforces the eight Digital Core Platforms rather than diverging from them. Working with senior business and Digital leaders, this leader sets priorities across initiatives, resolves cross-program trade-offs, and ensures the right architects and technical talent are aligned to the most important outcomes.

This position requires a senior leader with strong leadership, communication, and organizational skills who can operate at the intersection of strategy, architecture, platform alignment, and organizational leadership. The Senior Director will create clarity from complexity, orchestrate work across many initiatives and teams, develop senior technical talent, and establish a practical, connected strategy that helps Pfizer deliver faster, safer, and more reusable digital capabilities at global scale.

Role Responsibilities

Connected Technology Strategy: Own the connected technology strategy across the strategic technology initiatives, ensuring each initiative aligns to and strengthens the eight Digital Core Platforms and Pfizer’s enterprise architecture standards. 
Platform Alignment and Reuse: Ensure the strategic initiatives make deliberate, reusable use of the eight Digital Core Platforms, driving consistency, reuse, and clean integration rather than duplicated or divergent solutions. 
ELT-Level Initiative Leadership: Lead the technical strategy and senior stakeholder alignment for key Executive Leadership Team (ELT)-level AI programs, translating ambiguous enterprise priorities into a coordinated set of initiatives with clear owners, delivery models, and measurable outcomes. 
Architect Team Leadership: Oversee, lead, and develop a team of Senior Technical Architects, setting direction, balancing workload across initiatives, and ensuring consistent architecture quality and standards across the portfolio. 
AI-Enabled Delivery: Define how AI, automation, and modern engineering practices are responsibly applied across the initiatives to increase speed, improve quality, strengthen decision-making, and maintain appropriate governance and verification. 
Leadership, Communication, and Organization: Provide clear leadership and set direction with strong, structured communication; organize and coordinate work across many initiatives, architects, and stakeholders; and build a high-performing, inclusive team culture of accountability and continuous learning. 
Governance and Delivery Assurance: Establish expectations for reliability, security, documentation, and operational excellence across the initiatives, and provide the governance and reporting that keep senior leaders informed and the portfolio on track. 

ROLE BEHAVIOURS

Don't Lose Your Curiosity: Fosters a culture of curiosity and continuous learning across the initiatives and architect team; sponsors experimentation and cross-initiative learning; brings emerging technologies and outside-in perspectives into the connected strategy
Set an example for your team: Consistently demonstrate a clear vision, positive energy, and exemplary leadership that motivate the architect team and initiative stakeholders to strive for their highest potential
Own the Outcome: Sets clear accountability standards focused on business impact and connected delivery; takes end-to-end ownership of outcomes across the portfolio of initiatives; drives quality and delivery commitments in the AI era
Connect Across Disciplines: Connects work across initiatives, architects, platforms, and business domains; inspires holistic solutions and reuse; translates specialized knowledge into accessible explanations; thinks like a business insider
Communicate with Precision: Communicates with exceptional clarity and structure; frames trade-offs and priorities crisply; tailors the message from ELT sponsors to engineers; drives clarity and alignment as a core value across the portfolio
Think in Systems: Shapes systems design and architecture practices across the initiatives; connects programs into a coherent whole; anticipates dependencies and risks; influences cross-team architecture decisions; creates clarity from complexity

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, with 12+ years of significant leadership experience in technology strategy, architecture, or large-scale program delivery. 
Demonstrated experience leading the technology strategy and delivery of multiple concurrent programs or initiatives, and connecting them into a coherent whole. 
Proven ability to lead and develop senior technical talent, including architects, principal engineers, and other senior specialists. 
Experience advising senior leaders on technology direction, priorities, trade-offs, and measurable business outcomes. 
Strong understanding of modern engineering practices, cloud platforms, data and integration patterns, AI-enabled delivery, security, reliability, and technology governance.