Engineering Director - AI Solutions (Enabling Functions)

Posted date Sep. 04, 2026
Contract type Full time
Job ID R\-258650

Why choose AstraZeneca Spain?
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AstraZeneca Spain is a rising force in our global business. With headquarters in Madrid and our global hub in Barcelona, we’ve become an important international centre of excellence in the fight against critical disease. Boasting vibrant universities and business schools, the Barcelona ecosystem is a place where scientists can thrive. We attract a diverse workforce from across the globe, shining a beacon for innovation in a country that’s committed to clinical development.

We invite you to bring your talents to Barcelona where our respiratory medicine R\&D and Global Marketing centre offers opportunities in R\&D, IT, Commercial and HR. Or join us in Madrid and shape our growth in our BUs (Respiratory, Oncology \& CVRM ), and a range of Corporate functions. Additionally, you can find sales roles throughout the country. Together, we’re contributing to a world\-leading pipeline of therapeutics and delivering life\-changing medicines to patients.

Who do we look for?
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Calling all tech innovators, ownership takers, challenge seekers and proactive collaborators. At AstraZeneca Spain, breakthroughs born in the lab become transformative medicine for the world's most complex diseases. Alongside technical expertise, colleagues have the resilience, energy and collaborative mindset to change lanes, work with different teams and start projects from scratch.

Here, diverse minds and bold disruptors can meaningfully impact the future of healthcare using cutting\-edge technology. Whether you join us in Madrid or Barcelona, you can make a tangible impact within a global biopharmaceutical company that invests in your future. Join a talented global team that's powering AstraZeneca to better serve patients every day.

Success Profile
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Ready to make an impact in your career? If you're passionate, growth\-orientated and a true team player, we'll help you succeed. Here are some of the skills and capabilities we look for.

Diverse collaborators

This is a speak\-up culture that values collaboration. You’ll proactively bring your unique perspectives, experiences and skills to the table and seek the same from others. With our international team composition and the need for fast\-paced collaboration, you’ll always be building new connections with colleagues.

Cutting\-edge innovators

When you join us, you’ll be part of a team that embraces digital technology and data to transform the way we work and the work we do. Every day, you’ll help make history, empowered to ignite your creativity and build something enduring.

Resilient trailblazers

Here, the answers aren’t always available. So, you’ll need to bring a fearless, self\-starter mindset to navigate uncharted territories. You’ll harness your ceaseless energy to discover and make the necessary connections with colleagues to shape the future and achieve maximum impact.

Agile movers

Seize ownership and excel with autonomy to enjoy the constant rush of ground\-breaking discovery. Your ability to anticipate sudden shifts and adapt swiftly will prove critical as you make your mark in an environment that rewards initiative and resilience.

Responsibilities
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Job ID R\-258650 Date posted 09/04/2026
Role Overview

A senior engineering leadership role responsible for the technical direction, hands\-on delivery, and production scaling of AI solutions across enterprise enabling functions — including HR, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Audit, Compliance, and Business Development.

This is a builder\-leader role. The Engineering Director combines deep hands\-on AI engineering — designing and shipping multi\-agent systems, RAG pipelines, and governed AI applications — with the technical leadership required to drive a team from opportunity identification through to production deployment. They bring a rare and deliberate combination: the ability to move from idea to working proof\-of\-concept in days, alongside significant depth in AI governance, operational resilience, and regulatory compliance — not as adjacent knowledge, but as a core professional discipline that shapes how they build, assess, and operate AI systems.

The role sits within the Enterprise AI function and works in close partnership with enterprise technology, data engineering, technology governance, legal, information security, and functional stakeholders to deliver AI that is production\-grade, auditable, and compliant from the first commit — not retrofitted at the end. Given geographic considerations, the role carries particular responsibility for navigating multi\-jurisdictional data sovereignty, regulatory divergence, and cross\-border AI governance — ensuring systems are defensible under all applicable regulatory regimes.

Context

Enabling functions — HR, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Audit, and Compliance — govern how an organisation hires, contracts, spends, reports, partners, audits, and maintains compliance. They represent high\-value AI opportunities and high\-consequence environments — where outputs carry regulatory, financial, and reputational weight. Realising value at scale requires engineering leadership that can navigate complex data landscapes, build for reuse, and embed governance, human oversight, and operational resilience into architecture decisions from the outset.

These AI applications do not exist in a vacuum. Each system must be governed — classified, registered, monitored, auditable, and defensible to regulators, auditors, and internal oversight functions. The governance and resilience challenge is twofold: building AI systems that are *themselves* resilient and well\-governed, and ensuring the frameworks, processes, and controls that surround those systems are robust, proportionate, and continuously maintained. The role demands someone who has operated at this intersection for a significant portion of their career — not someone encountering governance as a new discipline.

This role is designed for an engineer who has already built AI applications inside a large, regulated enterprise, who has demonstrated experience delivering AI solutions across multiple enabling functions (e.g., HR, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Audit), who has significant experience governing AI systems and embedding operational resilience disciplines around them, and who treats regulatory requirements as architecture decisions — not compliance checkboxes.

Key Responsibilities

1\. Technical Direction \& Architecture

• Lead the engineering roadmap for AI across enabling functions, aligning architecture, delivery sequencing, and capability development to business priorities across HR, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Audit, and Compliance


• Set architectural direction for scalable, governed AI platforms — designing for modularity, cross\-functional reuse, and compliance from the outset


• Make high\-consequence technical decisions on architecture, build\-vs\-buy, model strategy (foundation models, fine\-tuning, multi\-provider orchestration, RAG), and integration patterns


• Drive platform thinking over project thinking — building shared components, reusable agent patterns, and common governance instrumentation that accelerate delivery across the portfolio


• Ensure architecture accounts for data sovereignty requirements — model routing, data residency, and hosting decisions that respect jurisdictional boundaries and cross\-border transfer requirements


• Shape investment cases for senior stakeholders, articulating engineering decisions in terms of scalability, risk, regulatory defensibility, and value creation

• Design and ship multi\-agent LLM architectures across multiple model providers, choosing models against product requirements and compliance constraints — including sovereignty\-aware routing through region\-specific infrastructure where required


• Build RAG pipelines over real enterprise corpora with named single\-purpose agents, hallucination guards before any user\-facing output, and immutable audit logging at every stage


• Use AI\-assisted development tooling to compress delivery from months to days, while keeping architecture decisions, model routing, and guardrails under deliberate human control


• Lead technical design for complex solutions spanning enabling functions — HR policy automation, contract risk scoring, procurement analytics, compliance monitoring, financial forecasting, audit analytics, and document intelligence — with governance built in from the first build


• Ensure rapid experimentation capability with clear engineering gates between proof\-of\-concept, pilot, and production — measuring against real data and real success criteria, not mock demos

*This is a defining pillar of the role.* The organisation requires an engineering leader with significant, demonstrated experience in AI governance — someone who has designed governance frameworks, built governance tooling, and operated in governance roles — not simply complied with governance requirements set by others.

• Governance architecture: Design and operate the governance structures that surround AI applications — classification and tiering, risk assessment, model registration, approval workflows, ongoing monitoring obligations, and decommissioning criteria


• Regulatory compliance (multi\-jurisdictional): Ensure systems meet requirements under applicable data protection laws, AI\-specific regulations (e.g., EU AI Act risk classification, emerging national AI frameworks), and sector\-specific operational resilience expectations — navigating divergence and maintaining defensibility under multi

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