C

Certara

Biosimulation and model-informed drug development platform

IT Lead – Service Desk Operations

Full-TimeDeadline 10/6/27
No salary listed
Senior
Budapest, Hungary
In Person
IT OperationsIT Service Desk & End User Support

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of IT experience with progressive responsibility.
  • At least 2 years of direct people-management or formal team-leadership experience within a Service Desk, Service Delivery, or IT Operations function.
  • A strong understanding of IT service management principles; ITIL or equivalent experience is preferred.
  • Demonstrated experience managing ticket queues, service-level agreements, and operational performance.
  • Experience enforcing documentation and process standards within a ticketing system such as Jira or ServiceNow.
  • The ability to coach employees, conduct performance conversations, set expectations, manage performance, and support professional development.
  • Demonstrated experience managing team workload, staffing coverage, priorities, escalations, and operational accountability.
  • Experience engaging technical teams and business stakeholders through communication.
  • The ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
Responsibilities
  • Monitor Service Desk queues to ensure timely intake, assignment, progression, and resolution of tickets.
  • Maintain operational visibility across the Hungary L2 queue and balance workload, priorities, and team coverage.
  • Ensure adherence to ticket standards, processes, documentation requirements, and service expectations.
  • Act as the management and technical escalation point for complex issues and service challenges.
  • Ensure clear, timely communication during incidents, outages, escalations, and planned roll-outs.
  • Provide day-to-day people leadership, guidance, and oversight to the Hungary-based L2 Service Desk team.
  • Manage team performance, workload, priorities, coverage, and resource allocation to ensure consistent Service Desk delivery.
  • Set performance expectations and hold team members accountable for service quality, responsiveness, documentation, customer experience, and process adherence.
  • Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to review performance, workload, development objectives, challenges, and improvement opportunities.
  • Coach, mentor, and provide actionable feedback to strengthen technical capability, customer service, ownership, and professional development.
  • Participate in formal performance management, including goal setting, performance reviews, development planning, recognition, and corrective performance discussions as appropriate.
  • Identify individual and team training needs and establish development plans to improve technical capability, operational maturity, and career progression.
  • Support onboarding, training, knowledge transfer, and integration of new Service Desk team members.
  • Coordinate team schedules, availability, planned leave, and operational coverage for Hungary, EMEA, and the broader global organization.
  • Act as the first management escalation point for L2 Service Desk operational issues, employee concerns, workload challenges, and service-delivery risks.
  • Partner with IT leadership on staffing requirements, organizational planning, recruitment, employee development, and succession planning.
  • Promote accountability, ownership, collaboration, professionalism, and continuous improvement.
  • Enforce established IT service management processes, workflows, and governance standards.
  • Identify operational gaps, inefficiencies, and recurring issues within Service Desk operations.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on quality, efficiency, customer experience, and team maturity.
  • Maintain consistency in service delivery, documentation, knowledge management, and audit readiness.
  • Ensure consistent, transparent communication with stakeholders.
  • Identify and escalate service trends, risks, capacity constraints, and systemic concerns.
  • Provide updates on Service Desk performance, team capacity, initiatives, employee-development needs, and improvement efforts.
  • Ensure the Hungary L2 team operates consistently with global Service Desk standards while addressing regional operational requirements.
  • Track and analyze Service Desk metrics, including service-level agreements, ticket volume, backlog, ticket aging, escalations, workload distribution, and quality.
  • Use operational data to manage team performance and identify areas requiring intervention, coaching, or improvement.
  • Identify operational trends, risks, capacity concerns, and improvement opportunities.
  • Use data and insights to inform decision-making, prioritization, and resource planning.
  • Manage relationships with hardware and software vendors supporting Service Desk initiatives.
  • Coordinate procurement activities for hardware and software as required.
  • Ensure alignment with organizational standards and lifecycle expectations.
  • Oversee hardware request processes, including onboarding, replacements, and incident-related needs.
  • Partner with internal teams on renewals, lifecycle management, and asset optimization.
  • Be accountable for the performance and development of the Hungary L2 team as a whole, not solely for individual technical output.
  • Manage team performance against service expectations, including service-level attainment, backlog and ticket aging, escalation handling, documentation quality, customer experience, process adherence, and audit readiness.
  • Build team resilience through cross-training, knowledge development, succession planning, and appropriate operational coverage.
  • Escalate material performance, capacity, staffing, service, or operational risks to IT leadership with clear recommendations and follow-through.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience with ITIL or equivalent service-management methods.
  • Experience working in regulated or compliance-driven environments such as SOX or ISO.

About the company

Certara provides biosimulation and model-informed drug development tools and services to pharma, CROs, and researchers. Its products include Phoenix WinNonlin for PK/PD and NCA, the Simcyp Simulator for PBPK modeling, D360 for scientific informatics, and Certara.AI for AI-assisted medical writing and regulatory tasks. The platform suite builds and runs mathematical models to predict drug behavior, streamline data, and support regulatory submissions across discovery to market access. It differentiates itself with an end-to-end ecosystem and broad regulatory experience, serving thousands of organizations worldwide to speed up and improve drug development decisions.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

Radnor Township, Pennsylvania

Founded

2008

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Marvin Cloud launched worldwide on September 29, 2026, opening individual and academic subscriptions.
  • Q2 2026 software revenue grew 4%, and bookings rose 9% to $50.7 million.
  • Management targets $13 million annualized savings and authorized another $50 million buyback.

What critics are saying

  • Q2 2026 revenue grew 1%, while services fell 3% and margins compressed.
  • The May 2026 divestiture cut $50 million revenue and triggered 5% layoffs.
  • If software growth stalls, Veristat-era services weakness turns Certara into a low-growth niche vendor.

What makes Certara unique

  • Certara combines Simcyp, Phoenix, D360, and Chemaxon into one drug-development stack.
  • Its models sit inside FDA and global regulatory workflows, embedding switching costs.
  • The May 2026 divestiture sharpened Certara around software-led MIDD and biosimulation.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Professional Development Budget

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

3%

1 year growth

7%

2 year growth

17%
Certara
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2nd Model-Informed Drug Development Summit.

2nd Model-Informed Drug Development Summit. Conference: 2nd Model-Informed Drug Development Summit. Date: November 18 - 19, 2026 Location: Wyndham Boston Beacon Hil, Boston, MA Certara is an Expertise Partner of the summit. Certara is proud to support the 2nd Model-Informed Drug Development Summit, where clinical pharmacology, pharmacometrics, QSP, and regulatory leaders gather around the questions now shaping MIDD in practice: turning model-informed evidence into decisions regulators accept, preparing for ICH M15, and scaling quantitative methods beyond a single program. As the FDA MIDD Pilot Program, Project Optimus, and ICH M15 raise the bar on what sponsors are expected to bring, Certara's modeling, simulation, and regulatory expertise offers a practical route through the dosing, evidence, and submission questions teams are working through right now. Meet Certara at the summit. VP, Head of QSP Software Dr. Apgar is the VP, Head of QSP Software at Certara, and co-founder of Applied BioMath (acquired by Certara in Dec 2023). Prior to this, Josh was a Principal Scientist in the Systems Biology Group of the Department of Immunology and Inflammation at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. His work leveraged physics-based models to: translate in vitro and in vivo data, assess target feasibility, understand drug mechanism of action, and predict human doses. The ultimate goal of this work was to reduce late stage attrition in drug development through a deep and quantitative interrogation of drug pharmacology and disease pathophysiology. Josh received his PhD from MIT in Biological Engineering where he worked on experiment design for Systems Biology, focusing on the identification of tractable experiments that could allow for the estimation of unknown parameters and reveal complex mechanisms in signal transduction networks. Before that Josh worked at Avaki to develop a highly scalable software platform to support High Performance Computing, and Enterprise Information Integration in the Life Sciences, and Engineering. Katie Williams, PhD Global Portfolio Lead, Modeling & Simulation Where to hear Certara insights and expertise. Speaking session: Wednesday, Nov 18 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM What Certara is seeing in MIDD: regulatory momentum, ICH M15, and what it means for your next submission. Scientific poster: Details coming soon - check back here for the Certara research being presented during the summit's dedicated poster session.

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2nd TCE for Autoimmune Disease Summit.

2nd TCE for Autoimmune Disease Summit. Conference: 2nd TCE for Autoimmune Disease Summit. Date: October 27 - 29, 2026 Location: The Colonnade Hotel, Boston, MA Certara is proud to support the 2nd T-Cell Engager for Autoimmune Disease Summit, where discovery, translational, preclinical, and clinical leaders are tackling the field's biggest challenges: reducing CRS toxicities, improving tissue-selective immune depletion, and expanding T-cell engager (TCE) targets beyond B-cells. As autoimmune TCEs move from oncology-inspired concepts into one of the industry's most closely watched therapeutic modalities, Certara's quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) expertise offers a mechanistic path through the dosing and translational questions shaping this fast-moving field. Meet Certara at the summit. VP, Head of QSP Software Before co-founding Applied BioMath, Josh was a Principal Scientist in the Systems Biology Group of the Department of Immunology and Inflammation at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. His work leveraged physics-based models to: translate in vitro and in vivo data, assess target feasibility, understand drug mechanism of action, and predict human doses. The ultimate goal of this work was to reduce late stage attrition in drug development through a deep and quantitative interrogation of drug pharmacology and disease pathophysiology. Josh received his PhD from MIT in Biological Engineering where he worked on experiment design for Systems Biology, focusing on the identification of tractable experiments that could allow for the estimation of unknown parameters and reveal complex mechanisms in signal transduction networks. Before that Josh worked at Avaki to develop a highly scalable software platform to support High Performance Computing, and Enterprise Information Integration in the Life Sciences, and Engineering. Scientific poster. Details coming soon - check back here for Certara's latest T-cell engager research being presented at the summit.

Certara
Oct 1st, 2026
How do you know you have the right dose? Using exposure-response evidence to justify and defend dose decisions.

How do you know you have the right dose? Using exposure-response evidence to justify and defend dose decisions. Date: Thursday, November 5, 2026 Time: 10:00 - 11:00am ET Summary. Selecting the right dose is one of the most consequential decisions in drug development. But how do you know your selected dose is truly the right one and that the rationale will stand up to scientific and regulatory scrutiny? Exposure-response (ER) analysis can provide critical evidence for dose selection, optimization, benefit-risk assessment, and regulatory decision-making. But an apparent relationship does not always tell the full story. Exposure metric selection, treatment interruptions, dose modifications, and time-dependent confounding can influence results and potentially lead to the wrong conclusions. Join Certara experts to explore how rigorous ER analysis and modeling and simulation can help teams evaluate dose options, address uncertainty, integrate efficacy and safety, and build scientifically defensible dose recommendations. The discussion will also examine how ER analysis fits within Model-Informed Drug Development (MIDD) and the evolving expectations for dose optimization under FDA Project Optimus and ICH M15. During this webinar, you will learn how to: * Select exposure metrics and ER approaches based on the specific development question * Recognize when treatment interruptions, dose modifications, and time-dependent confounding may distort ER conclusions * Use modeling and simulation to evaluate dose options, assumptions, and uncertainty * Integrate efficacy and safety ER evidence to strengthen benefit-risk assessment * Translate ER findings into scientifically defensible dose recommendations * Use quantitative evidence to support regulatory interactions and labeling decisions * Position ER analysis within a broader MIDD evidence strategy This webinar is designed for professionals in clinical pharmacology, pharmacometrics, modeling and simulation, MIDD, clinical development, regulatory and translational sciences, and development strategy involved in dose selection, optimization, and regulatory decision-making. Speakers: Vice President, Europe/APAC Regional Lead of Quantitative Science Dr. Cheung has more than 20 years of experience in modeling and simulation, as well as clinical pharmacology, with expertise in PBPK/PD mechanistic modelling, special populations (e.g., pediatrics, maternal, and geriatrics), extrapolation, model-based meta-analysis, vaccines, infections, HIV, complex biologics, and different therapeutic areas across early, late-phase and post marketing drug development. She is an honorary professor at the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, UK. She is leading the EU funding project, ERAMET (grant agreement number 101137141), in work package 5, championing the enhancement and utilization of extrapolation in pediatric populations and for rare diseases. Before joining Certara, Amy was a Senior Pharmacometrician and Scientific and Project Leader at the AstraZeneca Pediatric Working Group, which included 22+ cross-functional pediatric experts. During this time, she also served as the company representative on the IMI DDMoRe initiative and co-led work packages (e.g., PMX-workflow, cardiovascular training) and IQ consortium CPLG Pediatric Working Group. Dr Cheung has been a member of the EFPIA MID3 workgroup since the 2011 EMA M&S workshop, which resulted in several white papers. Currently, she is contributing her expertise to various professional societies, such as the IQ Consortium, EFGCP, ASCPT, and EU Horizon-funded projects. She has published over 50 papers on MIDD methodology/applications, reviews, and white papers in peer-reviewed journals. Senior Director Dr. Eline van Maanen brings over 16 years of experience in pharmacometric consulting. She joined Certara in 2018. Before that, she was a PKPD consultant at LAP&P Consultants. Eline has dedicated her entire career to the field of pharmacometrics. Her expertise includes mechanistic PKPD modeling across a range of therapeutic areas, such as neurology, oncology and infectious diseases. Eline received a PhD in Pharmacology from Leiden University in 2017, where she studied systems pharmacology of the amyloid cascade under the supervision of Prof. Meindert Danhof. Eline has a background in engineering, holding a MSc degree in Life Science and Technology from Delft University of Technology. Outside of work, Eline enjoys pilot-gig rowing. Senior Director Anna Largajolli, PhD is a Senior Director at Certara Drug Development Solutions with over 15 years of experience in pharmacometric modelling and clinical pharmacology. She holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering (cum laude) and a PhD in Pharmacometric Modelling, all from the University of Padova (Italy). Her career spans academia and industry, including a visiting PhD studentship at the University of Cape Town, a postdoctoral fellowship at Uppsala University (Sweden), and a postdoctoral fellowship at GSK, before joining Certara in 2016 where she has progressively advanced to her current senior leadership role. Anna has deep expertise across a broad range of modelling and simulation techniques - including population PK, PKPD, model-based meta-analysis (MBMA), and machine learning-based covariate selection - applied across multiple therapeutic areas. She leads project teams, mentors junior associates, and contributes actively to scientific innovation through an extensive publication and conference presentation record.

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