Executive Director, Applied AI Engineering

Executive Director, Applied AI Engineering (Hyderabad-Hybrid)

Syneos Health® is a leading fully-integrated life sciences services organization built to accelerate customer success. We partner with innovators at every point across the drug development and commercialization continuum, helping them navigate complexity, anticipate change and accelerate progress.
 
Every day we perform better because of how we work together, as one team, each the best at what we do. We bring together talented experts across a broad spectrum of business critical corporate functions. Every role plays an essential part in enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our teams are agile, collaborative, and committed to delivering—for each other, for our customers, and ultimately for the people who rely on the services we support.
Discover what your 25,000 future colleagues already know:
 
Why Syneos Health
• We are passionate about developing our people, through career development and progression; supportive and engaged line management; technical and therapeutic area training; peer recognition and total rewards program.
• We are committed to building an inclusive culture – where you can authentically be yourself. Central to this is our purpose – Driven to Deliver – which captures the passion of our colleagues to show up each day and shape solutions that have the ability to dramatically impact someone’s life. 
• We are continuously building the company we all want to work for and our customers want to work with. Why? Because we know that when we bring together smart colleagues from across the world, we can shape the future of healthcare, driving impact for customers and defining the pace of patient progress. 

Job Responsibilities

Core Responsibilities

1. Product Engineering Leadership

·       Lead Product Engineering delivery across Clinical, Commercial, and Corporate technology portfolios.

·       Own engineering execution from concept through deployment and business value realization.

·       Establish modern product-centric engineering practices and PDLC standards.

·       Improve delivery predictability, release quality, and operational excellence.

·       Drive modernization of legacy platforms into cloud-native, API-first architectures.

·       Develop reusable engineering frameworks, services, and accelerators.

·       Improve engineering throughput, release velocity, and technology resilience.

·       Lead distributed product engineering teams across global delivery centers.

2. Applied AI, Product AI & GenAI Leadership

·       Define and execute Applied AI and Product AI strategy across engineering portfolios.

·       Operationalize Generative AI, RAG, Agentic AI, and intelligent workflow automation capabilities.

·       Drive AI-enabled business capabilities within Clinical, Commercial, and Corporate products.

·       Accelerate movement of AI initiatives from experimentation to production.

·       Drive adoption of AI-enabled features that improve customer, operational, and business outcomes.

·       Partner with Data, Architecture, and AI platform teams to define scalable AI delivery patterns.

Reusable AI engineering patterns

·       Enterprise LLM services

·       RAG frameworks

·       Knowledge engineering

·       AI orchestration patterns

·       Agentic workflow frameworks

·       AI evaluation and observability standards

3. AI-PDLC & Engineering Productivity Transformation

·       Lead enterprise adoption of AI Delivery Lifecycle (AI-PDLC) practices.

·       Drive AI-assisted software engineering across the SDLC.

·       Introduce engineering copilots and AI-assisted development workflows.

·       Create engineering productivity dashboards and value realization metrics.

·       Establish reusable engineering automation frameworks.

·       Reduce manual engineering effort through intelligent automation and platform reuse.

AI-enabled engineering practices

·       Requirements generation

·       User story creation

·       Solution design assistance

·       Code generation

·       Code review

·       Developer productivity tooling

·       Test generation

·       Technical documentation

·       Release documentation

4. Cross-Functional AI Delivery & Platform Enablement

·       Partner with Data Governance, Enterprise Data, Architecture, MLOps, DataOps, Security, and Quality Engineering organizations to deliver production-grade AI solutions.

·       Drive alignment between Product Engineering and enterprise AI platform capabilities.

·       Ensure AI solutions are built using approved enterprise patterns and governance standards.

·       Collaborate with platform teams to accelerate AI deployment, scalability, observability, and supportability.

·       Support adoption of enterprise AI, cloud, and analytics platforms across engineering teams.

·       Champion reuse of enterprise data, AI, and platform services to reduce duplication and accelerate time to value.

5. Engineering Portfolio & Value Realization

·       Manage a large-scale Product Engineering and Applied AI portfolio.

·       Partner with Product Leadership to prioritize investments based on business value and strategic objectives.

·       Establish portfolio planning, delivery reviews, roadmap governance, and investment prioritization frameworks.

·       Drive business case development and value realization tracking.

·       Improve engineering capacity utilization and organization productivity.

·       Support annual planning, budgeting, workforce strategy, and vendor management.

·       Deliver measurable business outcomes through platform rationalization, modernization, automation, and AI adoption.

6. Required Qualifications

Leadership Experience

·       20+ years of progressive technology leadership experience.

·       10+ years leading large software engineering organizations.

·       5+ years at Executive Director, Senior Director, VP, or equivalent leadership level.

·       Proven track record managing organizations of 100+ technology professionals.

·       Experience managing large-scale product engineering portfolios.

·       Demonstrated success leading technology modernization and organizational transformation initiatives.

·       Experience driving enterprise-wide engineering productivity and operating model transformation.

Get to know Syneos Health

Over the past 5 years, we have worked with 94% of all Novel FDA Approved Drugs, 95% of EMA Authorized Products and over 200 Studies across 73,000 Sites and 675,000+ Trial patients.

No matter what your role is, you’ll take the initiative and challenge the status quo with us in a highly competitive and ever-changing environment. Learn more about Syneos Health.
 

http://www.syneoshealth.com

Additional Information

Tasks, duties, and responsibilities as listed in this job description are not exhaustive.  The Company, at its sole discretion and with no prior notice, may assign other tasks, duties, and job responsibilities. Equivalent experience, skills, and/or education will also be considered so qualifications of incumbents may differ from those listed in the Job Description. The Company, at its sole discretion, will determine what constitutes as equivalent to the qualifications described above.   Further, nothing contained herein should be construed to create an employment contract.  Occasionally, required skills/experiences for jobs are expressed in brief terms. Any language contained herein is intended to fully comply with all obligations imposed by the legislation of each country in which it operates, including the implementation of the EU Equality Directive, in relation to the recruitment and employment of its employees.  The Company is committed to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including the provision of reasonable accommodations, when appropriate, to assist employees or applicants to perform the essential functions of the job.