Director, Data Engineering & Platforms

Job Overview

At Charles River Laboratories, we’re transforming how we work by harnessing the power of AI, data, and digital innovation to accelerate the discovery and development of life-saving therapies. Our vision is to embed artificial intelligence and advanced analytics across every stage of our scientific and operational workflows—empowering our teams with smarter tools, seamless data, and actionable insights to deliver client-centric services and solutions that better serve our customers and, ultimately, improve patients’ lives.

This position is a technology leader who thrives at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, data engineering, and AI innovation. Serve as a trusted advisor and hands-on expert, partnering across business units and IT to architect and optimize our Azure-based enterprise data platform. Mentor engineering and operations teams, champion best practices, and drive automation and scalability through modern DevOps and data engineering tools. Possesses deep expertise in the Microsoft Azure data ecosystem, a passion for building resilient, future-ready platforms, and a desire to shape the next generation of data and AI capabilities at Charles River. Solves complex challenges, influences architectural decisions, and enables transformative analytics.

This position reports directly to the local country manager in India, with a dotted line reporting relationship to the VP, Global Data and Analytics Officer. In addition to the leadership and team management role within the data & analytics team, this position will also have all remote Global Tech (GT) employees based in India as direct reports, including from teams such as, but limited to: IT Infrastructure & Support, Applications, Design & Development, and InfoSec & Compliance. This added responsibility is to ensure high-level local management support to all GT remote staff in India. This position will be required to partner with local HR, corporate HRBP, matrix managers, and the local country manager on employment processes, such as hiring and onboarding, performance management, compensation processes (bonus & salary planning), etc.

• This is a fully remote, work-from-home position based in India.
• Candidates must be able to work standard UK business hours.

Job Description

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Serve as a key member of the Enterprise Data & Analytics leadership team
• Provide leadership and support to data & analytics team members in a follow the sun support model for building and managing data solutions
• Serve as a local manager for all remote GT staff based in India, host regular check-in meetings with each employee.
• Regularly meet with matrix managers of India-based GT employees
• Provide support to users of data & analytics products
• Ensure our data solutions are secure, cost-effective, highly responsive and fit for purpose across our extensive database and storage infrastructure
• Champion the use of data, technology & modern tooling to optimize our solutions and provide continuous process improvements
• Assist in monitoring technology budgets and spend recommending cost optimization where appropriate

Knowledge/Skill Requirement:

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Math, or related fields; Master’s degree is preferred
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• 12+ years of progressively responsible experience in information technology
• 7+ years building data platforms in Azure with the following services Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Azure Service Bus, Azure Virtual Machines, Blob Storage, Azure SQL Database, Virtual Network, Azure App Service, Fabric, Power BI
• 7+ years of management experience in a technology organization with a strong track record of building and leading high-performing teams
• 7+ years managing data and analytics teams
• 5+ years managing and facilitating follow-the-sun data operations and/or data engineering
• 5+ years of incident management and resolution
• An equivalent combination of education and experience may be accepted as a satisfactory substitute for the specific education and experience listed above.

Preferred Skills:

• Proficiency in troubleshooting database issues.
• Proficiency in Data Warehousing & BI Analytics.
• Experience with Infrastructure As Code.
• Experience designing and managing Generative AI systems for document ingestion, summarization, and content generation.
• Expertise in DevOps and MLOps for developing Generative AI solutions