Engineering Team Lead

Associate Director - Engineering

Associate Director - Engineering

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

Engineering Leadership

• Lead the design, development, and operation of scalable, cloud‑based data platforms including data lakes, data warehouses, and streaming architectures
• Own end‑to‑end data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration pipelines (batch and streaming) from source systems to curated analytics layers
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for performance, reliability, security, testing, and operational excellence
• Ensure platforms meet enterprise requirements for availability, scalability, regulatory compliance, and cost optimization.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to understand data needs and translate them into scalable technical designs
• Contribute to enterprise data architecture standards, reference architectures, and long‑term platform strategy
• Support analytics, reporting, and data science teams by enabling trusted, well‑modeled, and accessible data assets & data dictionaries
• Adopt the use of AI where applicable to enhance and support our client delivery needs.

People & Delivery Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of data engineers through coaching, career planning, and performance management
• Build high‑performing teams using modern engineering practices (CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing)
• Plan and manage delivery across multiple concurrent initiatives, balancing roadmap priorities, capacity, and technical debt
• Partner with vendors and contract resources as needed to support delivery goals

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform development, or data‑centric systems
• 5+ years of experience leading engineering teams, projects, and technical roadmaps
• Strong experience with cloud data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Azure, AWS) and modern data stack technologies
• Proficiency with SQL and at least one programming language commonly used in data engineering (e.g., Python, Spark)
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating large‑scale data ingestion and transformation pipelines

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.

Experience Level

Mid Level