Associate Director, AI Tech Lead

Job Description Summary

The location of this position is East Hanover, NJ.

The Insights and Decision Science (IDS) team is dedicated to enabling improved decision making at Novartis by leveraging superior data, AI, and innovative technology to identify actionable insights that drive enhanced performance. We collaborate closely with the US business, bringing insights and challenging ideas to empower smarter, data-driven decision-making. Reporting into the Director, AI Technology, the Associate Director for AI Tech Lead is crucial in driving the strategic integration of artificial intelligence into our product offerings, enhancing our competitive edge in the pharmaceutical industry.

This position plays a pivotal role in identifying and leveraging emerging opportunities in generative and agentic AI to support the broader IDS goals. By leading the development and prototyping of AI-based solutions, the AD transforms innovative ideas into market-ready products that align with the company's strategic objectives. This individual will interact directly with business users and IDS team to showcase tech capabilities, translate requirements to innovative solutions and options, and aid in the development of architecture and roadmaps to support use case prototypes or projects to host products created by the Data Science Team.

• Develop and maintain strong, trust-based relationships with US business partners and IDS team members to understand their business objectives and provide tailored AI solutions.
• Translate business requirements and objectives into technical requirements needed to assess feasibility and support prototype development.
• Build solution(s) and roadmaps for innovative projects, focusing on quick/agile rollout of tools, testing, and iterating plans to improve and launch quickly.
• Create detailed design frameworks that define how the application will be structured and how components will interact, tools to support scalability and integration with existing platforms and systems.
• Contribute credible insights to strategic reviews and analysis and apply whole market perspective to enable deep customer understanding.
• Own the development of solution architecture to support use case prototypes.
• Collaborate with a diverse team to pull-through solution roadmap and oversee the development of AI prototypes.
• Support testing/UAT testing from key users/stakeholders across the business.
• Ensure the prototype addresses key business questions such as improving patient outcomes or enhancing manufacturing processes.
• Oversee rapid testing of PoC and MVP builds to reduce risk before full development.
• Able to clearly articulate the potential benefits of AI models to address business needs with a wide range of audiences, including lay audiences.
• Acts as an AI role model, championing a culture that embraces cutting-edge AI technologies and encourages experimentation and adoption of best practices.

Novartis seeks an experienced leader with a proven track record in successfully building product prototypes, with a strong ability to engage with key stakeholders to gather and incorporate feedback. A deep understanding of how AI solutions can address critical business challenges, such as enhancing patient outcomes and optimizing research and development processes, is essential. The candidate should be adept at comprehensive design blueprints and seamless integration of AI technologies.

A commitment to driving continuous improvement in AI solutions, informed by data insights and industry trends, is vital to this role.

Additional qualifications are as follows:

• A bachelor's degree in a related field is required;
  Master of Science and/or MBA preferred.
• 6-8 years of experience in tech development in the healthcare industry, including full-stack development experience.
• Extensive experience building relationships with stakeholders to translate AI and technology innovations into business value.
• Highly proficient in building AI product prototypes, working in conjunction with data science teams.
• Demonstrated ability to oversee the entire AI product development process, with experience creating solution…