Here’s a question worth sitting with: how many roles actually let you build something that outlives you?

This one does.

A leading pharmaceutical company based in Germany is looking for someone to lead its AI & Analytics function and “lead” undersells it. You’d be walking into one of the more ambitious builds in pharma AI right now: a company-wide semantic layer that will let the business access and reason over its data through large language models, independent of any single tech provider. It’s already got a blueprint. What it needs is someone to see it through, get the business behind it, and make it real. If you’re the kind of person who’s tired of shipping models that get used twice and forgotten, this is the opposite of that.

And it’s not just infrastructure, it’s genuinely at the sharp end of applied AI in drug discovery. Think: taking a mutated protein, running it through AI-driven analysis, and narrowing thousands of candidate molecules down to a handful worth testing in the lab, in about an hour, work that used to take a team of specialists months. That’s the kind of thing your team will be enabling. You’ll have secure access to 60+ LLMs, serious platform infrastructure, and a genuinely AI-literate organisation around you, so you’re not spending your first year convincing anyone that AI matters. They already know.

You’ll be leading a team of around 100 (60 direct plus roughly 40 externals), with six experienced leaders reporting to you across data science, AI platforms, analytics, and enterprise upskilling. It’s a big remit, and it’s meant to grow.

We’ll also be straight with you about what makes this hard, because we think you’ll appreciate that more than a glossy pitch. You won’t own every corner of AI in the company. Some of it sits elsewhere in IT, so you’ll need real influencing skill, not just technical authority, to bring people along. It’s a political role in the best sense: lots of stakeholders, lots of competing priorities, and a genuine need for someone who can build alignment rather than just issue instructions. You’ll also be running a live platform, not just a research function, so uptime and reliability matter as much as innovation. And you’re joining a highly regulated environment, where data governance isn’t box-ticking, it’s how the whole thing stays trustworthy.

If you’re weighing this against your current role, here’s what might tip it: a real seat at the frontier of applied AI, a legacy project with your name on it, a clear path upward, and a board that has given a clear mandate to drive AI Adoption across the Enterprise.

If that sounds like the kind of complexity you actually enjoy solving, not despite the challenge, but because of it, we’d like to talk.

The minimum requirements need to be considered for this role are:

• 5 years + working in a large matrix corporate
• At least 3 years of experience as a Head of, Director or VP of Data Science / AI in a large enterprise of 10k employees +
• Significant experience in Pharma, Life Sciences or an adjacent sector such as chemicals manufacturing or other heavy industry

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To explore this opportunity further and learn more, click the enquire today button.