Director – Managed Service Operations Lead

Director – Managed Service Operations Lead

Location: Chennai or Bangalore, India

Reports to: Senior Director – EUIT Data & AI Forward Engineering

The Opportunity

AstraZeneca is looking for an experienced technology leader to develop and lead the outsourced service approach for EUIT across our key technology collaborators.

In this highly visible role, you will play a key part in guaranteeing the technology services supporting our global business are reliable, secure and resilient. You will bring together operational excellence, strategic partnerships and business continuity while helping us use automation and AI to improve service quality, reduce cost and create capacity for innovation.

You will lead through influence rather than direct authority, working across EUIT, business teams and strategic partners to build shared accountability and deliver measurable outcomes.

This is broader than traditional service management or vendor oversight. You will have the opportunity to reimagine how technology operations work at scale, creating a more predictive, automated and self-healing environment while strengthening the resilience of our organisation.

What You’ll Do

Lead Managed Services and Operational Health

You will shape and continuously improve the EUIT managed service model across infrastructure, applications, data and technology platforms.

You will:

• Establish clear standards, governance and ways of working across strategic partners.
• Oversee service health across availability, resilience, security, performance, quality and user experience.
• Introduce outcome-based measures that connect technology performance with business impact.
• Strengthen major incident, problem and change management, with a focus on addressing root causes.
• Ensure new products and capabilities move smoothly into sustainable operations.

Build Predictive, AI-Enabled Operations

You will help move EUIT towards increasingly automated and self-healing operations.

Working with our partners and technology teams, you will establish a roadmap for automated detection, diagnosis and remediation. You will champion AIOps, observability and responsible use of AI to reduce manual effort, anticipate issues and improve the speed and quality of resolution.

You will also turn promising ideas into practical pilots and scalable capabilities that improve service quality and efficiency.

Improve Cost, Capacity and Business Value

You will bring service performance and commercial discipline together.

You will establish meaningful measures of unit cost and work with partners to improve efficiency through automation, consolidation, demand management, rightsizing and commercial opportunities.

Importantly, you will make the value visible. You will connect improvements in operational health, productivity, resilience and cost with increased capacity for innovation and higher-value business priorities.

Strengthen Business Continuity and Resilience

As the BCP leader for EUIT, you will shape the business continuity and disaster recovery approach across technology services and partners.

You will ensure critical services have current and tested recovery plans, coordinate EUIT's response during significant disruptions and strengthen resilience through regular exercises and continuous learning.

Working with Security, Business Resilience and business leaders, you will help ensure EUIT is prepared to respond effectively when disruption occurs.

Build Strong Strategic Partnerships

Our strategic partners are an extension of our technology ecosystem. You will help create relationships built on transparency, trust and shared accountability.

You will work with senior partner leaders to agree expectations, review outcomes and address challenges. In partnership with Procurement and Finance, you will strengthen commercial governance across contracts, demand, capacity, benchmarking and partner transitions.

You will also bring EUIT and partner teams together around an increasingly product-centric operating model where responsibility for reliability and continuous improvement is shared.

Create Clear Insight and Accountability

You will provide senior leaders with a trusted view of operational health, resilience, risk and partner performance.

By improving data, reporting and predictive insight, you will help teams identify emerging risks earlier and take action before they affect the business.

You will establish practical measures for service health, user experience, productivity, cost, resilience and capacity, making progress and business value easy to understand.

What You’ll Bring

You will bring significant experience leading technology operations or managed services in a large, complex organisation, combined with the confidence to work across senior stakeholders, technology teams and external partners.

Your experience is likely to include:

• 12+ years in technology operations, service management or related technology leadership roles.
• Leading or governing managed services across areas such as infrastructure, cloud, applications, data or technology platforms.
• Managing strategic technology partners and outsourced or offshore delivery models.
• Improving service reliability, operational resilience and performance at scale.
• Applying automation, AIOps, self-healing or AI to improve operational outcomes.
• Leading business continuity, disaster recovery or technology resilience programmes.
• Improving cost efficiency while protecting or improving service quality.
• Working in product-centric, DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering environments.
• Influencing senior stakeholders and delivering results across matrixed organisations without relying on direct authority.

A broad understanding of modern technology operations, including ITIL, SRE, DevOps, observability and FinOps, along with knowledge of business continuity, crisis management and disaster recovery, is also encouraged from you.

Experience with ISO 22301, MBCI, cloud, data or AI-related certifications is valuable but not essential.

Experience within pharmaceuticals, life sciences or another regulated environment would be beneficial.

How You’ll Lead

Success in this role comes from combining operational discipline with curiosity and forward thinking.

You will be comfortable making decisions in complex situations, bringing people together around shared outcomes and challenging constructively when something can be better.

You will build trusted relationships across cultures, locations and organisations. You will also help colleagues and collaborating groups develop capabilities in areas such as site reliability, automation, AI engineering, observability and service management.

Most importantly, you will bring an AI-first perspective and a willingness to rethink established approaches rather than simply maintain them.

Why Join Us?

This is an opportunity to influence how technology operations work across AstraZeneca at global scale.

You will help build a managed service environment that is more resilient, intelligent and increasingly self-healing. You will work directly with senior technology leaders and strategic partners, shape our approach to business continuity, and find new ways to convert operational improvements into capacity for innovation.

The impact extends beyond keeping technology running. You will help create an operating environment that enables AstraZeneca teams to move faster and focus more of their energy on delivering value for patients.

Inclusive Workplace

At AstraZeneca, we value different perspectives, experiences and ways of thinking. We want people to feel respected, supported and able to contribute at their best.

We welcome applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. If you require an adjustment or accommodation during the recruitment process, we encourage you to let our recruitment team know so we can support you.

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.