Director of Real-World Data Engineering & Orchestration

Parexel; England; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Bonus

Car allowance

Holiday entitlement

Job summary

Parexel is seeking an experienced data engineering leader to drive Real-World Data initiatives across ingestion, transformation, and distribution. You will orchestrate delivery across cross-functional teams in a life sciences context, balancing clinical, operational and commercial priorities.

The role demands hands-on cloud data platform expertise (Azure Databricks, lakehouse) and a track record of matrixed leadership, governance, and measurable value delivery in regulated environments.

Qualifications

• Deep technical expertise in enterprise data engineering including ingestion, transformation, lakehouse design, data quality, metadata management, and operational support.
• Strong matrixed leadership and orchestration skills across technical, clinical, commercial, governance, analytics, and business stakeholders.
• Predominant experience with life sciences data environments including Real-World Data, clinical research data, healthcare data, regulated data environments, 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Track delivered outputs against planned KPIs and expected value measures to ensure the data capability delivered the intended business, operational, clinical, and stakeholder outcomes.

Skills

Data engineering

Matrixed leadership

Life sciences data

Stakeholder engagement

Cloud platforms

Python

SQL

Spark

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Information Systems

Tools

Azure Databricks

Azure Data Lake

SQL

Python

Spark

APIs

Orchestration

CI/CD

Monitoring

Job description

Parexel is seeking an experienced data engineering leader to drive Real-World Data initiatives across ingestion, transformation, and distribution. You will orchestrate delivery across cross-functional teams in a life sciences context, balancing clinical, operational and commercial priorities.

The role demands hands-on cloud data platform expertise (Azure Databricks, lakehouse) and a track record of matrixed leadership, governance, and measurable value delivery in regulated environments.