Director, AI Platforms

About Parexel

Parexel is a global leader in clinical development, delivering advanced clinical and consulting solutions to the life sciences sector. With over 22,000 employees worldwide, Parexel collaborates with biopharmaceutical firms and research sites to design and execute patient-centered clinical trials that increase accessibility to clinical research as a treatment option globally.

Our culture values focus, agility, and a shared commitment to accelerate new therapies for patients. We embrace bold innovation, adaptability, and continuously enhance the speed and quality of clinical research.

Role Overview

The Director of AI Platforms will head the engineering team responsible for the foundational technology enabling AI capabilities across Parexel. This leadership role involves shaping platform strategy, maintaining infrastructure dependability, managing vendor partnerships, and ensuring accessibility and scalability of AI platforms for internal teams and external stakeholders. Collaboration with Engineering, AI solution teams, Quality, and central Infrastructure will be essential for advancing AI infrastructure at an enterprise level.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and refine AI platform strategies aligned with Parexel's enterprise AI goals, owning key architectural decisions for AI-centric platforms.
• Guarantee operational reliability, high performance, and monitoring of AI workloads in production environments by establishing service-level objectives supporting internal and external user groups.
• Oversee daily interactions with AI-specific vendors, manage contract and performance metrics, and serve as the primary escalation contact for vendor-related platform challenges.
• Lead incident management and continuous improvement initiatives concerning AI platform issues in partnership with support organizations.
• Coordinate with Engineering, Quality, and Compliance teams to assure platform features fulfill product delivery requirements and regulatory audit standards.
• Lead and cultivate a high-trust engineering team, focusing on recruitment and professional growth at advanced individual contributor and engineering leadership levels while promoting a culture of empowered leadership.

Desired Attributes and Skills

• Profound technical knowledge in cloud-based platform engineering with a focus on service-oriented solutions and making architectural trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience managing AI platforms in production, including familiarity with AI infrastructure components like Generative AI runtimes, vector databases, and agent orchestration.
• Expertise in vendor management, including contract negotiations, performance oversight, and relationship management.
• Strong verbal and written communication capabilities across engineering teams, vendors, and business sectors.
• Comfortable operating within regulated industries, preferably with exposure to life sciences or other GxP-related environments.

Mandatory Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Over a decade of experience in platform engineering, data engineering, or AI/ML infrastructure domains.
• Proven experience operating AI platforms, including managing GenAI runtimes, vector databases, and MLOps infrastructure in production settings.
• Strong background working with cloud infrastructure platforms such as AWS or Azure.
• Excellent organizational, communication, and analytical skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in a technical field.
• Knowledge of platforms like Palantir Foundry, enterprise Generative AI systems, or custom assistant infrastructures (e.g., Copilot Studio, Anthropic-based technologies).
• Experience in navigating and collaborating with centralized infrastructure organizations.

Additional Information

We promote a workplace of flexibility, professional development, and the environment for individuals to excel. Join us in shaping the future of clinical research through impactful AI platform leadership.