Executive Director, ETS – Connected Enterprise

Job Title: Executive Director, ETS – Connected Enterprise

Job Location: Chennai

Introduction to role

Are you ready to lead a transformation that will redefine the future of IT infrastructure? As the Executive Director of Connected Enterprise at AstraZeneca, you will lead a dynamic team, crafting the vision, strategy, and implementation of brand new IT infrastructure. This role plays a crucial part in guiding our cloud-native, AI-first transformation strategy, incorporating speed, agility, and digital proficiency throughout the organization. Based in Chennai, India, you will also be an integral part of the AstraZeneca Chennai Site Leadership team. Can you drive progress through technological advancements and empower originality?

Accountabilities

Strategic Perspective & Leadership: Establish the vision, approach, and direction for the CE organization, emphasizing alignment with cloud-native, sophisticated technology, and adaptable attitudes. Establish product/platform leadership that anticipates business opportunities, maximizes speed and adaptability, and inspires transformation across the enterprise.

Platform/Product Thought Leadership: Champion strategic platform and product direction—guiding end-to-end engineering, delivery, and operations for infrastructure products. Emphasize automation, workflows powered by artificial intelligence, and edge computing as foundational build principles.

Change Navigation: Lead teams and stakeholders through rapid periods of technological, organizational, and operational change, providing stability and clarity amidst disruption.

Innovation & Modernization: Introduce and operationalize innovative capabilities that increase competitive advantage and productivity—leveraging advancements in cloud-native technologies, edge AI, hyperautomation, and digital trust.

Teamwork & Influence: Build trusted relationships with IT and business leaders, aligning priorities and ensuring seamless delivery of digital platforms and services.

Develop and uphold a CE value map, connecting business goals with future-state business and technology capabilities.

Financial Stewardship: Control and optimize the annual CE budget, aligning resource allocation and platform investment to enterprise objectives.

Integrated ITSM & Governance: Define and manage a comprehensive ITSM landscape, deploying best-practice disciplines and toolsets.

Pioneering Security and Compliance: Collaborate with cybersecurity experts to embed security and compliance standards across all CE platforms.

Technology Foresight: Provide direction on the selection and integration of emerging technologies into CE platforms.

Continuous Improvement & Maturity: Drive the maturation of CE capabilities, advancing efficiency, productivity, and business collaboration.

Workforce Planning & Talent Evolution: Partner with HR and IT leadership to shape workforce plans that deliver the skills required for ongoing platform transformation.

Vendor & Lifecycle Management: Lead evaluation, selection, and management of strategic vendor relationships.

Automation-First Principle: Embed automation as a core principle across all platform domains.

Performance & Benchmarking: Champion analytical decision-making across I&O using business analytics to set performance metrics.

Essential Skills/Experience

• Executive strategic leadership: Demonstrable capacity in setting mission, vision, and multiyear roadmaps; converting enterprise strategy into platform/product outcomes; steering large, sophisticated, multi-domain IT organizations.
• Proficiency in cloud-native and prioritizing AI: Extensive knowledge of cloud structures (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), containerization, microservices, serverless setups, data/ML platforms, and operations involving AI; proven history of integrating AI and automation into infrastructure processes.
• Infrastructure platform ownership: End-to-end accountability across physical and virtualized infrastructure: networks (LAN/WAN/SDWAN), connectivity, edge computing, compute/storage, and observability; hands-on experience guiding engineering, operations, and lifecycle.
• Product-centric I&O: Expertise in product management for infrastructure platforms (product roadmaps, value cases, backlogs, outcomes), with agile/DevOps integration and SRE practices.
• Change leadership and transformation: Proven capability to lead through technological and organizational change, build high-performing cultures, and anchor transformation in measurable business outcomes.
• Automation-first approach: Consistent track record implementing Hyperautomationoss provisioning, CI/CD, config management, monitoring, incident/problem, and FinOps—using Infrastructure as Code and policy-as-c
• Collaborate closely with CISO on security, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance.
• Governance and ITSM perfection: Mastery of ITSM frameworks and tooling (incident, change, problem, CMDB, service catalog), with performance management, SLAs/SLOs, and operational compliance.
• Coordinating profit and loss or leading all aspects of large budgets; prioritizing investments, modeling total cost of ownership/value, and optimizing costs (incl. cloud FinOps).
• Vendor and ecosystem management: Skill in sourcing, negotiation, and strategic partnership management across hyperscalers, telco/network providers, hardware/software vendors, MSPs, and integrators.
• Collaborator influence: Ability to align business and IT leaders, communicate sophisticated technology simply, and drive consensus for enterprise platform decisions.
• Data-driven performance management: Use of analytics and benchmarking to set metrics, track outcomes, and continuously improve platform maturity.
• Workforce planning and talent development: Building skills for modern I&O (cloud, SRE, platform engineering, automation), with diversity, inclusion, and change-resilience.

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Industry domain familiarity (life sciences): Understanding of pharma R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, and commercial operations; experience with GxP validation.
• Edge AI and OT convergence: Experience integrating IT/OT in labs and manufacturing.
• Zero Trust leadership: Practical delivery of identity-centric architectures.
• Advanced observability: Experience with end-to-end telemetry at enterprise scale.
• Platform engineering frameworks: Building internal developer platforms.
• Enterprise architecture alignment: Ability to maintain a CE “value map.”
• Sustainability strategies: Energy efficiency in data centers.
• Global operating model design: Experience running follow-the-sun operations.
• M&A integration: Capability to assess acquired infrastructure platforms.
• Contracting models: Outcome-based contracts.
• Formal certifications: Advantageous but not mandatory—e.g., TOGAF.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we ignite bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work on average a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and bold world.

At AstraZeneca, your work directly impacts patients by transforming our ability to develop life-changing medicines. We enable our business to operate at its best by merging brand new science with top digital technology platforms. Here you'll join hackathons to explore new technologies or transform roles forever. With investment behind us there's no slowing us down as we drive cross-company change to disrupt the entire industry. Our diverse set of minds collaborates inclusively to drive innovation daily.

Ready to make a meaningful impact? Appl