Executive Director, AI and Transformation
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Job Overview: The Executive Director (ED) of AI and Transformation is the strategic executive leader overseeing the acceleration and adoption of AI/ML across Fortrea’s enterprise. The life sciences industry is at an inflection point and is entering the 4th industrial revolution. Clinical Research Organizations that reinvent themselves and adopt and scale AI/ML will continue to compete, grow, and deliver positive impact to biopharmaceutical sponsors, patients, and healthcare. The ED will lead Fortrea’s strategic AI/ML roadmap, contributing to differentiation, efficiency, and growth, influence the enterprise, and engage the life sciences ecosystem, connecting with peers in industry and technology.
Strategic Leadership, Planning, and Communication
* Develop a strategic vision and roadmap for AI/ML and ensure initiatives are aligned with the organization’s goals and objectives, including sales effectiveness, corporate function automation, regulatory content generation, knowledge retrieval and understanding, and clinical trial simulation.
* Partner with senior leadership to prioritize AI initiatives, develop business cases, and co‑own value generation, with performance evaluated based on business impact.
* Partner with consulting by providing thought leadership, frameworks, and solutions to differentiate and grow consulting revenue.
* Chair the AI council to drive business alignment.
* Obtain buy‑in from C‑level executives and leaders across the enterprise.
* Communicate vision to increase innovative reputation across the Fortrea enterprise, the life sciences ecosystem, and with peers in industry and technology.
AI/ML Development & Enterprise Implementation
* Work with data scientists and engineers to develop and deploy highly capable AI/ML models that address Fortrea’s business challenges.
* Effectively answer data science questions, build ML pipelines, and integrate results into business outcomes.
* Build a modeling ecosystem to answer sales and marketing questions such as marketing mix, attribution, and channel optimization.
* Apply AI/ML techniques to solve real‑world problems, using gradient boosting algorithms, neural networks, forecasting methods, and advanced data pipeline development.
* Productize AI/ML models and embed them within Fortrea’s global technology suite of products to drive growth and productivity.
* Partner across the business to help employees adopt and embed new ways of working.
* Ensure data availability, quality, and security required for training and deploying AI/ML models.
* Set AI/ML standards for the organization, including processes and monitoring metrics.
* Embed model retraining, validation, and continuous improvement.
Team Leadership and Collaboration
* Collaborate with key stakeholders, including business leaders and department heads, to understand requirements.
* Identify and eliminate friction points within the organization by re‑inventing processes using AI and AI agents.
* Lead a team of AI/ML professionals, including product managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, responsible AI leads, and AI researchers.
* Provide guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure the team’s success while building a collaborative culture.
* Establish partnerships to close skills and data gaps with academia, startups, and leading AI tech companies.
* Collaborate with cross‑functional teams—consulting, clinical, security, applications, and operations—to ensure seamless integration of strategic data and solutions.
* Work with and evolve better ways of working for data scientists and engineers across the enterprise.
* Influence and inspire the enterprise and lead through change.
Innovation and Thought Leadership
* Serve as a champion of AI/ML by facilitating efforts to incorporate AI/ML capabilities into the Fortrea business model, applications, and processes.
* Explore and evaluate emerging trends, technologies, and data providers to identify opportunities for adoption.
People Responsibilities
* 1–5 direct reports.
* 5–15 indirect reports.
Qualifications (Minimum Required)
* Bachelor’s degree in computer science, machine learning, data science, statistics, artificial intelligence, engineering, or a related field.
* Fortrea may consider relevant and equivalent experience in lieu of educational requirements.
* Preferred: Master’s or higher advanced degree in the aforementioned areas.
Experience (Minimum Required)
* Strategically oriented executive with over 15 years of experience in computer science, machine learning, predictive modeling, and analytics frameworks.
* Demonstrated ability to influence and drive change in a large, global, matrixed organization, especially within CROs, biopharma, and healthcare.
* Collaborative leader who can function effectively in a highly regulated environment during periods of dynamic change and prioritization, with a proven track record of scalable impact.
* 5+ years of experience leading a world‑class machine‑learning team or similar field.
* Exceptional technical skills in designing, architecting, and implementing AI/ML solutions.
* Deep understanding of AI/ML and data‑engineering toolchains, pipelines, and model‑training techniques.
* Experience extracting value from clinical research data and applying insights to drive business outcomes.
* Experience working with engineering, product, operations, and compliance leadership to craft roadmaps and success metrics.
* Proficiency with AI/ML techniques such as gradient boosting, neural networks, forecasting, and advanced data pipelines.
* Expertise in domains such as causal AI, reinforcement learning, generative AI, NLP, dimensionality reduction, computer vision, or sequential models.
* Proficiency in R and/or Python.
* Strong analytical and business acumen, able to think strategically in ambiguous environments.
* Experience with healthcare data is a plus.
* Ability to translate technical work for business partners.
* Strong operational and management skills with a track record of consistently meeting project deadlines, budgets, and delivering results.
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Job Details
* Seniority level: Executive
* Employment type: Full‑time
* Job function: Engineering and Information Technology
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