Sr. Director, R&D Portfolio Operations

Location: New Jersey, Hybrid

Medidata follows a hybrid office policy in which employees who are hired for an in-person position are expected to work on site a certain number of days per week in accordance with Company policy.

About our Company:

Medidata is powering smarter treatments and healthier people through digital solutions to support clinical trials. Celebrating 25 years of ground-breaking technological innovation across more than 36,000 trials and 11 million patients, Medidata offers industry-leading expertise, analytics-powered insights, and one of the largest clinical trial data sets in the industry. More than 1 million users trust Medidata's seamless, end-to-end platform to improve patient experiences, accelerate clinical breakthroughs, and bring therapies to market faster. Discover more at www.medidata.com.

About the Team:

As the Sr. Director, Portfolio Operations, you will oversee operational excellence across the entire product and technology portfolio, directly enabling both private and public cloud engineering initiatives. You'll partner closely with the VP of Cloud Engineering to align strategy, capacity, budgeting, technical roadmaps, and execution from planning through deployment. This role demands not just operational leadership but also a strong technical understanding of cloud architectures, platforms, and engineering workflows to ensure effective governance and planning. You will be reporting to Senior Vice President, R&D Operations.

Responsibilities:

The Sr Director - R&D Portfolio Operations is the operational and strategic backbone of technology delivery, ensuring engineering teams have the capacity, budget, and plans they need to succeed. By combining operational rigor with technical literacy, this role bridges the gap between strategy and execution, making transformational hybrid cloud initiatives both achievable and sustainable.

Oversee demand forecasting and resource planning across hybrid private/public cloud programs.

• Build models and processes to forecast AWS, Azure, VMware private cloud capacity, storage, and compute needs, ensuring alignment with roadmap demands.
• Own cloud and infrastructure financial planning, tracking OPEX for AWS, Azure, and private datacenter environments.
• Lead cost optimization initiatives, including reserved instance planning, storage tiering, and license management.
• Collaborate deeply with engineering leadership to understand architecture choices (e.g., AWS services, VMware clusters, SAN/NAS designs, networking models).
• Evaluate engineering proposals for feasibility, cost, and alignment with standards.
• Ensure planning accounts for infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD deployment models, and DevOps workflows.
• Design and enforce PLM/NPI governance across cloud infrastructure and application delivery teams.
• Standardize processes for design reviews, security approvals, infrastructure cost estimation, and lifecycle planning.
• Define and operate planning cadences-quarterly business reviews, capacity checkpoints, budget forecasting.
• Build dashboards and KPIs tracking capacity utilization, spend, delivery milestones, and risk.
• Act as the strategic connector among engineering, product management, security, finance, and executive leadership.
• Manage internal communications including exec briefings, status reports, and strategic updates.
• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing portfolio operations function, including planners, analysts, financial partners, and program managers.
• Foster technical literacy and collaboration within the team to support engineering

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of leadership experience in technology portfolio operations, product management, or engineering strategy, ideally within cloud-first organizations.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in business, computer science, engineering, or a related field; MBA is a plus.
• Proven success managing large-scale cloud and infrastructure programs with complex cost and capacity planning.

Technical Proficiency

• Strong familiarity with AWS, Azure, and VMware environments, including core services (EC2, S3, VPC, RDS), networking, security groups, and IAM.
• Understanding of private cloud architectures including virtualization (VMware vSphere/ESXi), SAN/NAS storage, and on-premises networking.
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code concepts (Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD workflows.
• Comfortable reading and understanding scripts in PowerShell, Bash, or Python to evaluate automation and deployment plans.
• Ability to collaborate with engineers and architects on technical designs and cost models.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Exceptional strategic thinker with the ability to translate technical detail into business impacts.
• Excellent communicator who can align executive stakeholders and engineering teams.
• Strong financial acumen, with experience managing budgets, forecasts, and cost controls for technology programs.
• Ability to mentor teams to develop both operational discipline and technical literacy as this role will require managerial responsibilities
• Experience establishing governance models for hybrid cloud deployments, including security reviews, cost tracking, and risk management.
• Familiarity with compliance regimes relevant to regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance, government).
• Certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Architect, or VMware VCP.
• Experience with AI/ML workloads or modern data platforms in hybrid environments.

The salary range posted below refers only to positions that will be physically based in New York City/ New Jersey. As with all roles, Medidata sets ranges based on a number of factors including function, level, candidate expertise and experience, and geographic location. Pay ranges for candidates in locations other than New York City/ New Jersey, may differ based on the local market data in that region. The base salary pay range for this position is $184,500-$246,000.

Base pay is one part of the Total Rewards that Medidata provides to compensate and recognize employees for their work. Most sales positions are eligible for a commission on the terms of applicable plan documents, and many of Medidata's non-sales positions are eligible for annual bonuses. Medidata believes that benefits should connect you to the support you need when it matters most and provides best-in-class benefits, including medical, dental, life and disability insurance; 401(k) matching; flexible paid time off; and 10 paid holidays per year.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

In order to provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals, employment decisions at Medidata are based on merit, qualifications and abilities. Medidata is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or medical or common conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, familial status, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, veteran status, military service, application for military service, genetic information, receipt of free medical care, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Medidata will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities, in accordance with applicable law.

Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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