Job Description

At Charles River, we are passionate about improving the quality of people's lives. When you join our global family, you will help create healthier lives for millions of patients and their families.
Charles River employees are innovative thinkers, who are dedicated to continuous learning and improvement. We will empower you with the resources you need to grow and develop in your career.
As a Charles River employee, you will be part of an industry-leading, customer-focused company at the forefront of drug development. Your skills will play a key role in bringing life-saving therapies to market faster through simpler, quicker, and more digitalized processes. Whether you are in lab operations, finance, IT, sales, or another area, when you work at Charles River, you will be the difference every day for patients across the globe.
Job Summary
Do you have expertise in, and a passion for Data Engineering?
Would you like to be a part of an innovative digital movement, with the chance to build and implement strategies?
Have you got the desire to improve health and lives?
Charles River Laboratories are excited to be recruiting for a Director of Data Engineering to be part of the Enterprise Data Analytics team. Working remotely, you'll have a team of 5-6 direct reports and will apply a deep technical knowledge of data engineering to implement a comprehensive strategy that aligns with business goals and accelerates digital transformation efforts.
You'll be joining a purpose-driven team aligned with our mission: Together We Create Healthier Lives. As part of our broader Global Technology organization, we are embarking on a bold Digital Journey--reimagining how we operate to become a leading, digitally powered CRO. Our goal: accelerate drug discovery and development, reduce timelines by a full year, and deliver innovative, safe, and effective treatments to patients faster.
Over the next several years, we'll be applying cutting-edge techniques in data engineering, data management, forecasting, simulation, optimization, and more--and we want you to be part of this transformation.
What You'll Be Doing:
Strategic Leadership

• Collaborate with business leaders and technology stakeholders to shape a unified data architecture vision and develop a strategic roadmap for scalable implementation
• Champion innovation in data engineering by leveraging emerging technologies and evolving platform capabilities to sustain and enhance competitive advantage
• Establish and enforce data engineering standards, best practices, and governance frameworks to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance across all data initiatives

Technical Excellence

• Architect and oversee enterprise-scale data platforms leveraging Microsoft Azure ecosystem (Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Bricks, Azure Data Lake, Event Hubs etc.)
• Lead advanced implementation of Databricks for large-scale data processing, machine learning workflows, and real-time analytics
• Ensure adoption of data products leveraging semantic models built on PowerBI and enterprise reporting capabilities to deliver actionable business insights
• Design and implement robust data pipelines supporting gigabyte-scale data ingestion, transformation, and distribution
• Ensure data platform security, compliance, and performance optimization across all environments

Organizational Leadership

• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of 7+ data engineers, senior engineers, and technical specialists
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Data Science, Analytics, IT, and Business Intelligence teams to deliver integrated solutions
• Foster culture of innovation, continuous learning, and technical excellence within the data

engineering organization
Operational Excellence

• Oversee enterprise data engineering operations ensuring 99.9%+ uptime, optimal performance, and cost efficiency
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and incident response capabilities for mission-critical data systems
• Partner with Data Platforms team to drive automation initiatives and DevOps practices to enhance deployment speed and operational reliability

Job Qualifications
Skills and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Math, or related fields; master's degree is desirable
• Significant workplace experience in technology leadership, with a proven track record of building, mentoring, and scaling high-performing engineering teams
• Proven track record of hands-on data engineering, data warehousing and ETL tools experience
• Deep applicable expertise in database and data architecture, with demonstrated experience in designing robust dimensional data models
• Strong knowledge of Azure data stack and integration architectures
• Experience with Finance Reporting modernization
• Experience with enterprise platforms such as - Salesforce, SAP
• Well-versed in a range of project management methodologies, including Agile, Iterative, and Waterfall
• Experience running data governance, cleansing and standardization initiatives
• Demonstrated passion for advanced data analysis, strong experience with relational databases, SQL, and proficiency using analytic tools to answer business questions

Preferred Skills:

• Azure certifications (Azure Data Engineer Associate, Azure Solutions Architect Expert)
• Databricks certifications (Professional Data Engineer, Professional ML Practitioner)
• Experience in regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, manufacturing)
• Experience with enterprise systems like Salesforce, SAP

About Corporate Functions
The Corporate Functions provide operational support across Charles River in areas such as Human Resources, Finance, IT, Legal, Sales, Quality Assurance, Marketing, and Corporate Development. They partner with their colleagues across the company to develop and drive strategies and to set global standards. The functions are essential to providing a bridge between strategic vision and operational readiness, to ensure ongoing functional innovation and capability improvement.
About Charles River
Charles River is an early-stage contract research organization (CRO). We have built upon our foundation of laboratory animal medicine and science to develop a diverse portfolio of discovery and safety assessment services, both Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) and non-GLP, to support clients from target identification through preclinical development. Charles River also provides a suite of products and services to support our clients' clinical laboratory testing needs and manufacturing activities. Utilizing this broad portfolio of products and services enables our clients to create a more flexible drug development model, which reduces their costs, enhances their productivity and effectiveness to increase speed to market.
With over 20,000 employees within 110 facilities in 20 countries around the globe, we are strategically positioned to coordinate worldwide resources and apply multidisciplinary perspectives in resolving our client's unique challenges. Our client base includes global pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, government agencies and hospitals and academic institutions around the world.
At Charles River, we are passionate about our role in improving the quality of people's lives. Our mission, our excellent science and our strong sense of purpose guide us in all that we do, and we approach each day with the knowledge that our work helps to improve the health and well-being of many across the globe. We have proudly worked on 80% of the drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the past five years.
At Charles River Laboratories, we recognize and recruit all talent. We are a company committed to the principle of diversity and inclusion and work daily in this direction.
For more information, please visit www.criver.com.

Skills Required