Executive Director Clinical Operations, Program Management at AstraZeneca in UK - Cambridge

Job description

• Are you ready to lead a global cell therapy clinical operations franchise that accelerates life-changing treatments for patients across oncology, rare disease, and autoimmune conditions?
• As Executive Director Clinical Operations, Program Management (ED, CTPM), you will own strategic leadership and end-to-end delivery for a pivotal autologous cell therapy portfolio spanning phase 1 through registrational studies.
• Your decisions will determine how quickly and reliably our programs reach patients, and how we scale a portfolio with rigor, pace, and quality. Reporting to the Head of Cell Therapy Clinical Operations, you will shape and standardize ways of working across multiple programs and geographies, partnering with senior operational and clinical leaders to ensure predictable execution to time, cost, and quality.
• You will build a high-performing team of Senior Director-level program managers, strengthen capabilities, and set a clear vision, metrics, and governance that elevate performance across the franchise. Do you thrive on turning complex portfolios into consistent, inspection-ready delivery that advances bold science?

Responsibilities

• Franchise Strategy: Define and steward short- and long-term clinical operations strategy across all programs, ensuring clarity of direction and a robust path to delivery.
• Therapeutic and Country Strategies: Develop a cohesive franchise-wide approach covering therapeutic clinical operations, country footprint and site strategy, and consistent, deliverable operational clinical development plans.
• Portfolio Issue Leadership: Drive resolution and consistency for franchise-level clinical operations issues impacting multiple global product teams.
• Study Oversight: Provide strategic oversight and global leadership for all in-scope cell therapy studies to deliver to agreed time and cost, with unwavering focus on quality and regulatory compliance.
• Enterprise Governance: Serve as clinical operations franchise leader at enterprise-level cell therapy governance; act as a core member of the Protocol Review Committee for CTCO leadership sign-off; ensure studies are operationally robust ahead of Development Review Committee and ESPC/LSPC.
• Vision, Prioritization, and Metrics: Establish and communicate the franchise delivery vision, strategy, prioritization, portfolio insights, and key performance metrics that drive accountability and continuous improvement.
• Forecasting and Prioritization: In partnership with the CTTO global Executive Director for planning, deliver a rigorous slot forecasting strategy and make data-driven prioritization decisions for the franchise.
• Submission and Inspection Readiness: Ensure franchise-wide excellence in submission preparation and inspection readiness, embedding standards and proactive risk management.
• Team Leadership: Build strong, capable, and passionate teams of Clinical Operations Program Leaders; attract, develop, and retain Senior Director-level talent; foster excellence in cell therapy trial execution.
• Leadership Team Membership: Act as a core member of the Cell Therapy Clinical Operations Leadership Team, shaping department strategy, functional build, and forward planning.
• External Engagement and Innovation: Engage with industry leaders to bring external innovation into CTCO; benchmark, pilot, and scale practices that improve speed, quality, and patient impact.
• Transformational Sponsorship: Sponsor large-scale transformation across and beyond CTCO, simplifying processes, strengthening governance, and enabling accelerated, reliable delivery.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
• Extensive experience in Drug Development with direct experience in clinical drug development setting, including direct clinical operations experience
• Line management expertise; experience of performance management of Snr Director level Staff in a large pharmaceutical or biotech setting
• Demonstrated development of others, identifying and providing opportunities to improve the capabilities of other people
• Functional Experience in contributing meaningfully to Clinical Operations functional improvement initiatives that cross clinical programs management experience, managing resourcing, budget planning and functional level activities
• Professional excellence: Background of high professional achievement and willingness to encourage this in others
• Leads change with a positive approach; sees change as an opportunity to improve performance and add value to the business - Influencing and stakeholder management
• Supplier/Partnership Management
• Excellent communication skills
• Demonstrated ability to set and manage priorities, resources, performance targets and project initiatives in a global environment
• Creative and Innovative: Seeks to improve continuously where it counts, based on good awareness of external competitive practice, and creativity and initiative
• Output/delivery focused - Maintains high standards, including a commitment to AstraZeneca values, policies and employment principles
• Cultural Awareness: Is aware of and sensitive to cultural differences and their impact on communication, expectations and performance.
• Teamwork and cross functional Collaboration: Is effective in leading and being a member of teams, both locally and internationally.
• Willingness to travel domestically and internationally
• Advanced Degree (MS, MBA, PhD)
• Comprehensive knowledge at a leadership role in clinical and pharmaceutical drug development processes
• Experience working internationally: working with major markets/resolution of international issues
• Business planning skills: has knowledge/experience of planning processes used in managing drug projects
• Risk and crisis management experience
• Experience of leading global teams (leading leaders of leaders)

Skills

Required

• Supplier/Partnership Management
• Excellent communication skills

Preferred

• Risk and crisis management experience