IT Solutions Delivery Lead, R&D Operations
Location San Rafael, California Workstyle Hybrid ApplyJob Description
Location:San Rafael, Ca
Company Description
BioMarin is the world leader in delivering therapeutics that provide meaningful advances to patients who live with serious and life-threatening rare genetic diseases. We target diseases that lack effective therapies and affect relatively small numbers of patients, many of whom are children. These conditions are often inherited, difficult to diagnose, progressively debilitating, and have few, if any, treatment options. BioMarin will continue to focus on advancing therapies that are the first or best of their kind.
By providing a foundation for all operations company wide, BioMarin’s General and Administrative teams support our mission of providing first and best in class therapeutics to patients who live with rare diseases. Our teams include groups such as finance, legal, human resources, corporate compliance and ethics, and information technology. Come join our team and make a meaningful impact on patients’ lives.
About the Opportunity
The IT Solutions Delivery Lead, R&D Operationsrole is critical to ensuring successful development and delivery of Information Technology strategies which emphasize the IT organization’s leadership role in “managing information technology” which includes System Ownership for the R&D organization’s systems which allow the business to focus on what they are best at.
The R&D organization is responsible for everything from research and discovery to post-market clinical development. Our customers include Research, Clinical Sciences, BioMetrics, Clinical Development/Operations, Pharmacovigilance, Regulatory, Medical Affairs, etc.
The position will maintain full time engagement to the R&Ddepartmentand continually capture and examine the unique needs and concerns of the business to manage the standard support practices and procedures for identifying, scoping, developing, testing, and releasing/publishing R&D business systems. The position will provide system support, maintenance, licensing, data management and project delivery for the life of their systems.
Will be an integral part of the globalR&D IT Solution Delivery and Support team, with responsibility for developing, maintaining, monitoring, and supporting an industry specific set of R&D Operations systems. Will work closely with the business SME’s and IT project managers to capture and prioritize all requests for the R&Ddepartment and address and/or escalate any data, process and technical issues that inhibit the vision and enhanced efficiencies of the business needs and change.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
System Ownership
- Technical ownership of SAS 9.4, SAS Viya, R-Studio, Phoenix WinNonLin, PumasAI, etc.
- Lifecycle Management of applications to deliver business capabilities while ensuring efficient allocation of resources across our technology landscape.
- Financial responsibility of all system operational expenses.
- Manage Software Vendors to ensure SLAs are met and system is up to date.
- Manage Licensing for your systems including budgeting and growth forecasting.
- Facilitate Application Steering Committees to maximize value delivered by applications and always improve UX.
- Participate in change control boards and design review committees.
- Bridge the gap between business needs and technology constraints to develop the right strategy/solution for the company.
Project Delivery
- Support new application and system deployment projects with an emphasis on the software development life cycle (SDLC).
- Participate as subject matter expert (and in some cases lead) projects with project managers, technicians, and business analysts.
- Develop and implement technical strategies for various validated/qualified computer systems with an emphasis on global enterprise systems.
- Partner with the business team to implement next-gen applications and upgrade existing applications.
- Develop Solution Options based on user requirements including level of effort and cost estimates.
- Champion internal IT standards and best practices during the design/implementation phase of a project.
- Provide analytical support for multiple complex projects; establish work plans and timelines; co-ordinate with internal and external sources.
- Organize technical requirements gathering and solution design sessions with customers, partners, and other technical resources of all levels.
- Developing support plan and ensuring smooth turnover of operations.
System Administration
- Responsible for managing, administering, configuring, and maintaining business application operations through the System Development Lifecycle.
- Manage Vendors and Service Providers to ensure system support needs are met.
- Provide technical guidance to peers, contingent staff, and support vendors.
- Communicate system outages, changes, and overall status to key business stakeholders.
- Maintains systems under department control in qualified state by establishing and enforcing platform standards aligning with Quality Assurance and Computer System Validation policy, along with Health Authority regulations.
- Develop and administer system procedures for installation, monitoring, performance utilization, upgrades, backups, recovery, and overall operations in a validated environment.
- Develops and maintains reports, scorecards, and tools to enable regular business monitoring of system key indicators.
- Provide tier 3 developer support for your systems, e.g., root cause analysis, working with IT peer technology SMEs, and working with vendor support to resolve issues.
- Prioritize and support R&D related incident/service tickets related to owned systems.
- Continuous improvement of support processes.
- Track, prioritize, and fulfill all system enhancement requests.
- Plan, build, deploy, secure, integrate, and support application solutions for R&D.
- Work schedule may include ‘out of normal’ work hours for IT support & maintenance.
Skills and Attributes
- Decision Making: The ability to make sound and effective decisions from all available information.
- Collaboration: Seek the perspective of others and partner with others across and outside the organization to define and reach a shared goal. Persuade by effectively sharing information. Influence is based on credibility and earning the respect of others.
- Agility and Problem Solving: An adaptable and flexible attitude, allowing you to approach and solve a problem by examining it from different angles. Strongly developed problem-solving skills are crucial in this role.
- Leadership: Strong Leadership Skills in Project Definition, Mitigation, and overall Delivery. Ability to provide constructive feedback to vendors and service providers. Ability to set technical direction to project teams and upper management for your systems.
- Organization: This role demands high level organizational skills as you will be managing all aspects of your systems from build and maintain to financial accrual and forecasting.
- Communication: Written and verbal communication to gather information about a problem and propose solutions. Required to communicate with team members of all levels.
- Technical: Deep understanding of SAS architecture (SAS Grid, SAS Viya, SAS 9.4, etc.) Proficiency in Linux/Unix and Windows server environments. Shell scripting for automation and troubleshooting. Familiarity with SQL and connecting SAS to databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, etc.) ETL processes and data warehousing concepts. Managing user roles, permissions, and authentication (LDAP, Active Directory). Understanding of encryption, data masking, and compliance requirements. Load balancing and resource management in grid environments. Implementing disaster recovery plans. Regular backups of metadata and configuration files. Automating tasks using shell scripts, Python, or SAS macros. Scheduling jobs using tools like cron, LSF, or SAS Job Scheduler.
- Project management: Strongly developed organizational and time management skills to move a project from start to finish.
Education and Experience
- Bachelor of Science or greater in Computer Science, Business Administration, Information Technology, Biology, Chemistry or a related technical field or significant experience in supporting research systems in the pharmaceutical industry.
- Desire to have a minimum of 5 years’ experience in technical or business analyst role with a focus on R&D functional systems and/or Information Technology.
- Experience in computer database management, programming, or software development familiar with developing Power Apps and Power Automate.
- Experience with Pharma/BioTech R&D systems such as SAS 9.4, SAS Viya, R-Studio, Phoenix WinNonLin, PumasAI, etc.
- Data analysis expertise familiar with database technologies such as SQL, Oracle, Excel, Power BI, etc.
- Delivering mid-to-large size projects with teams of 5 to 15 members on time and within budget.
- Have a general knowledge of the underlying scientific principles applied to the development and manufacture of biopharmaceuticals.
Note: This description is not intended to be all-inclusive, or a limitation of the duties of the position. It is intended to describe the general nature of the job that may include other duties as assumed or assigned.
Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled
An Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.
For additional benefits information, visit: https://careers.biomarin.com/benefits.
- Eligible employees may participate in benefit plans, subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable plans.