- Location
- GBR - Sandwich, United Kingdom · Europe - Any Pfizer Site
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Operations
- Seniority
- Lead
- Closing date
- Today
- Source
- Workday
Description
ROLE SUMMARY
Sentinel is one of the eight Platforms forming the core of Pfizer’s artificial intelligence (AI) transformation. Sentinel provides a single front door to deploying and maintaining infrastructure and services. Its scope moves beyond the traditional hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and into the non-hyperscaler space, where the same front door can stand up a Supabase instance, a Grok agent, or whichever new capability arrives next. Sentinel does not stop at provisioning either: it takes on the agentic management of what has been deployed. Knowing precisely what has been deployed is the foundation that agentic management rests on.
We are seeking a Sentinel Asset Inventory Lead, responsible for the delivery of the source of truth for all Sentinel deployed assets. This role demands attention to detail, an appetite for rigor in processes and an approach focused on data quality, accuracy and freshness. You will own the process design for data freshness and quality assurance that will encompass both agentic and human approaches, and you will be accountable for reporting drawn from data with a complex origin and real latency – reporting that has to be both accurate and timely.
You will work very closely with the Cloud Infrastructure organization within the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) function, which owns the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that provides a core component of the asset inventory. The asset inventory extends the CMDB rather than replacing it, introducing new capabilities that specifically address the need for high volume and near real time performance, extensions to cover novel asset types, and metadata about assets that cannot reside in the CMDB. The role reports to the Senior Director, Engineering Lead, in an organization that runs up through the Vice President, Initiative Lead and the Chief Technologist to the Chief Information Officer (CIO). You will carry no colleague line management, and will lead one or more contract engineering resources who build the Asset Inventory technical capability.
This role encompasses the end to end delivery of the Sentinel asset inventory, a component of the Sentinel platform, and is global in scope: the inventory covers every asset Sentinel deploys, across every business line Sentinel serves. The organizational lines you work across are those between Digital and the Cloud Infrastructure organization within the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) function, and you will work across them and their stakeholders to communicate the vision and purpose of the Asset Inventory effectively, take part in technical, engineering level discussions and be perceived as credible in them. You will be accountable for the quality, accuracy and freshness of the record the wider platform depends on, creating clarity from ambiguity in an estate that changes continuously.
ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES
In order of importance, indicate the primary responsibilities critical to the performance of the role. It is recommended not to list actual tasks but focus on 5-8 essential responsibilities that highlight accountability and level of judgment required.
ASSET INVENTORY LEADERSHIP
You own the source of truth for all Sentinel deployed assets and the technical capability behind it:
- Source of Truth Ownership: You are accountable for the Sentinel asset inventory as the single authoritative record of every deployed asset, from the definition of what constitutes an asset through to the coverage, correctness and currency of what the inventory holds. You own the inventory’s data model: the contract engineers are responsible for building it, you are accountable for it being right.
- CMDB Extension: You define how the inventory extends the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) owned by the Cloud Infrastructure organization within the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) function instead of duplicating it, introducing the capabilities the CMDB is not intended to carry: high volume and near real time performance, novel asset types, and metadata that cannot reside in the CMDB.
- Technical Credibility: This is a delivery leadership role, not a hands-on engineering one. You bring a working command of data modelling, schema design, reporting and performance considerations — enough to hold a real design discussion with the deep technical resources who write the code, to question an estimate, probe a design decision, and tell a considered answer from a plausible one. You communicate effectively with those engineers, and translate what they build accurately for stakeholders who are not technical.
DATA QUALITY AND FRESHNESS
You own the processes that make the inventory trustworthy, and the standards against which its trustworthiness is judged:
- Process Design: You own process design for data freshness and quality assurance, encompassing both agentic and human approaches, and you decide deliberately which checks belong to automation, which belong to an agent, and which need a person, taking considered risks to advance the process where the conservative answer will not scale.
- Quality Standards and Measurement: You define what accuracy, completeness and freshness mean for each asset type, set measurable targets against them, instrument the inventory so those measures are visible, and hold the capability to them.
- High Churn Reconciliation: You establish the reconciliation practice that keeps the inventory honest in a complex, high churn estate: continuous comparison against source systems, detection of drift and orphaned or missing assets, and a clear route from an exception to its correction.
DELIVERY
You lead the build of the Asset Inventory technical capability and the delivery of the roadmap behind it:
- Roadmap Ownership: You own the delivery roadmap for the asset inventory, sequencing coverage of asset types and sources against the demand the platform places on it, anticipating consumers beyond Sentinel as the inventory matures — security and compliance among the most likely — and keeping the plan honest as priorities change.
- Contract Resource Leadership: You lead one or more contract engineering resources who build the Asset Inventory technical capability, setting technical direction, quality expectations and priorities, working alongside them through the development of the data model so that it meets the requirements of the asset inventory component, and ensuring the effort is appropriately resourced to meet the deliverables and timescale commitments.
- Dependency and Risk Management: You surface dependencies early — on the CMDB, on the systems that emit asset data, and on the teams that own them — and drive blockers to resolution with those teams, keeping affected stakeholders informed throughout. You exercise judgment in complex decisions and act independently on what you can see coming — a feed going stale, a source system changing shape — rather than waiting for a wrong number to surface it.
- Cross-Team Facilitation: You convene and run detailed technical working sessions with the Cloud Infrastructure organization and Sentinel engineering, taking them to real decisions rather than status updates, and you navigate the politics of aligning teams that carry their own priorities and commitments.
REPORTING AND DOCUMENTATION
You are accountable for what the inventory reports and for the record of how it works:
- Reporting Accuracy and Timeliness: You understand the intricacies of reporting data that has a complex origin with latency, and you hold reporting to being both accurate and timely: figures that state their provenance and how current they are, and a regular, credible view of inventory coverage, quality and delivery health for platform, technical architecture and Digital leadership, including at Digital Leadership Team (DLT) level.
- Design, Decision and Lineage Records: You lead the capture of the design decisions behind the data model and the lineage of every feed into the inventory, create the systems and conventions that keep that record usable, and mentor others on maintaining it.
PEOPLE
You work across organizational lines to carry the purpose of the Asset Inventory, and you build the relationships the inventory depends on:
- Influence Across Organizational Lines: You work across organizational lines and stakeholders to communicate the vision and purpose of the Asset Inventory effectively, earning the right to shape other teams’ priorities by being useful to them and by being right often enough to be trusted.
- Multi-Audience Communication: You influence through communication at all levels, from individual engineers in a design session to executive stakeholders in a DLT review, and you handle difficult conversations skillfully.
- Stakeholder Partnership: You build durable working relationships across globally distributed organizations and teams: the Cloud Infrastructure organization within the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) function, Sentinel platform engineering, the Technical Architecture team, the Product Ownership team, and day to day the Financial Operations (FinOps) and SparkPro teams. You keep those relationships strong enough that the difficult conversations happen early rather than late.
ROLE BEHAVIOURS
- Don’t Lose Your Curiosity: Actively seeks out new asset types, new sources and new detection techniques before they are asked for; sponsors experiments in agentic quality assurance; brings new approaches back into the roadmap rather than admiring them from a distance
- Own the Outcome: Holds the accuracy, completeness and freshness of the inventory as personally owned, including where the data originates in systems other teams run; treats a wrong number as their problem to fix and their process to change
- Be Polymath Oriented: Champions cross-disciplinary learning; works comfortably across configuration management, data engineering, cloud infrastructure and AI domains; translates specialized knowledge into accessible explanations; thinks like a business insider
- Communicate with Precision: Specifies data definitions, quality thresholds and interfaces exactly rather than approximately; is explicit about latency and provenance; mentors others on precise communication; spans C-level executives to frontline engineers
- Think in Systems: Reasons about the estate end to end, from the API call that creates an asset to the figure in an executive report; anticipates failure modes across team boundaries; creates clarity from complexity; bridges technical systems with business processes
QUALIFICATIONS
Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline with strong relevant experience in technical asset or configuration management, data platform engineering or infrastructure engineering, including substantial time owning a source of truth for a complex, high churn estate. Proven track record of designing and holding process rigor around data quality, accuracy and freshness, and of leading engineering delivery through resources that did not report to you.
EXPERT-LEVEL SKILLS
- Technical Asset Management: You have managed a technical asset estate in a high churn, complex environment, and you know what it takes to keep a record of it correct while it changes underneath you.
- Data Quality and Freshness Assurance: You design quality and freshness processes rather than inherit them: definitions, thresholds, automated checks, agentic and human review, and a route from exception to correction.
- Process Rigor and Attention to Detail: You hold a high bar for detail and for the discipline of a process being followed, and you are the person who notices the discrepancy before a stakeholder does.
- Reporting on Complex, Latent Data: You understand the intricacies of reporting data with a complex origin and real latency, and you report it accurately and on time without overstating what it can support.
- Cross-Organizational Communication: You work across organizational lines and stakeholders to communicate a technical vision credibly, from individual engineers to executive stakeholders.
PRACTITIONER-LEVEL SKILLS
- Configuration Management Databases: You know ServiceNow and its Configuration Management Database (CMDB) well enough to hold your own in a design discussion, including configuration item classes, the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), discovery, and reconciliation rules.
- Cloud Platforms: You understand how assets are represented in AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP, including resource and tagging models, inventory and resource graph APIs, identity and access, and infrastructure as code.
- Data Modelling and Pipelines: You are comfortable with data modelling and schema design, and you understand ingestion at volume and near real time, schema evolution, idempotency and deduplication. You appreciate the performance considerations that decide whether the inventory answers in time — indexing, query cost and latency budgets — and you know how platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks are provisioned, governed and consumed.
- AI and Agent Literacy: You understand large language models and agent frameworks well enough to follow and challenge a design, and to know what it takes for an agent to be trusted with assuring or correcting inventory data.
- Stakeholder Navigation: You work effectively across organizational boundaries and competing agendas without losing the technical thread.
WORKING-LEVEL SKILLS
- Reporting and Visualisation Tools: You can build and critique the reports and dashboards the inventory feeds, and you know when a visualisation is misrepresenting the data behind it.
- FinOps: You understand cloud cost models well enough to partner credibly where asset inventory data underpins attribution, showback and optimisation.
- Time Management and Deep Work: You carry a broad portfolio of asset types and stakeholders without dropping threads, and protect the focus time that real technical work requires.
ORGANIZATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS
Provide the primary groups or key role(s) that this role will have interaction with as a regular part of the role responsibilities. Include any external interactions as appropriate.
Digital: Sentinel Platform Engineering, Technical Architecture, Product Ownership, Financial Operations (FinOps), SparkPro and other 8 Platforms Teams
CISO: Cloud Infrastructure, as owner of the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Business lines served by Sentinel, including Research and Development (R&D) and Pfizer Global Supply (PGS), engaged through the Sentinel platform team rather than directly
Senior Business Stakeholders and Digital Leadership Team (DLT)
3rd party vendors and contract engineering resource
RESOURCES MANAGED
Financial Accountability
No direct budget or revenue accountability. The role directs contingent engineering resource against an agreed envelope and partners with the Financial Operations (FinOps) team where asset inventory data underpins cost attribution, but spend accountability sits outside the role.
Supervision
No direct colleague reports. One or more contingent (contract) engineering resources led to build the Asset Inventory technical capability. Significant matrix influence over engineering colleagues in the Cloud Infrastructure organization within the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) function and in partner platform teams whose systems the inventory depends on.
Purpose
Breakthroughs that change patients' lives... At Pfizer we are a patient centric company, guided by our four values: courage, joy, equity and excellence. Our breakthrough culture lends itself to our dedication to transforming millions of lives.
Digital Transformation Strategy
One bold way we are achieving our purpose is through our company wide digital transformation strategy. We are leading the way in adopting new data, modelling and automated solutions to further digitize and accelerate drug discovery and development with the aim of enhancing health outcomes and the patient experience.
Flexibility
We aim to create a trusting, flexible workplace culture which encourages employees to achieve work life harmony, attracts talent and enables everyone to be their best working self. Let’s start the conversation!
Equal Employment Opportunity
We believe that a diverse and inclusive workforce is crucial to building a successful business. As an employer, Pfizer is committed to celebrating this, in all its forms – allowing for us to be as diverse as the patients and communities we serve. Together, we continue to build a culture that encourages, supports and empowers our employees.
DisAbility Confident
We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer and we encourage you to put your best self forward with the knowledge and trust that we will make any reasonable adjustments necessary to support your application and future career. Our mission is unleashing the power of our people, especially those with unique superpowers. Your journey with Pfizer starts here!
To learn more about acceptable and prohibited uses of AI during the recruitment process, please review our candidate AI-use guidelines available on Pfizer Careers.
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