Associate Director Data Engineering

About the role

AstraZeneca is looking for a highly skilled and experienced Senior Data Engineer to join its team in Barcelona, Spain. This is an in-office role with a minimum of three days per week on site, and no remote or travel flexibility. The role has a significant impact on the delivery of Data Products to the Oncology R&D organisation, with a focus on advancing the data stack, automation and observability.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain the infrastructure and pipelines for extracting, transforming and loading data used in data products and analyses.
• Work with data scientists and stakeholders to understand data needs and design data systems and pipelines to meet them.
• Implement data ingestion, transformation and storage systems in a FAIR and high-quality way.
• Ensure the reliability, scalability and performance of data systems and pipelines.
• Implement data governance policies and procedures for the security, privacy and integrity of data.
• Collaborate with other data team members to build and maintain data products and services.
• Stay up to date with new technologies and best practices in data engineering.

Required profile

• Computer Science, Engineering or Bioinformatics background (Master level) with 5 years of relevant experience.
• Ability to work across multiple scientific compute environments such as HPC, cloud and Unix/Linux systems.
• Understanding of FAIR data principles and of typical data quality issues, including cleaning and masking techniques.

Required skills

• Deep knowledge of Python and extensive use of data and scientific libraries such as pandas, numpy/scipy and polars.
• Experience interacting with structured and unstructured data sources such as HDFS, SQL and noSQL.
• Desirable: experience with metadata models, controlled vocabularies and ontologies.
• Desirable: pipeline orchestration tools such as Airflow, Prefect, AWS Glue or Dagster.
• Desirable: AWS services (S3, EBS, EC2, CloudWatch, SNS, Lambda).
• Desirable: expertise with biological and health data, especially NGS and other omics technologies.