Sentinel Surface Lead

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 Surface is that front door made visible: the user interface through which infrastructure engineers deploy, maintain and destroy infrastructure and services via Sentinel.

We are seeking a Sentinel Surface Lead, responsible for the delivery of the interface through which Pfizer’s infrastructure engineers meet Sentinel. The Surface has to make managing infrastructure and services simple without patronising the people using it: our users are practitioners who know their domain, and an interface that conceals too much or explains too much will lose them as surely as one that exposes everything. Holding that line is the central judgment of this role. You will own the delivery, the architecture and the design of Sentinel Surface, and you will be accountable for the experience it delivers.

Sentinel Surface is the presentation layer for Sentinel. It is layered on top of Sentinel’s components — the Service Catalog, the Asset Inventory, and those that follow as the platform grows — and its job is to turn what they hold into a compelling and highly functional interface for the engineers who use it. The components remain authoritative for their own domain; the Surface is where they become usable. You will work closely with the teams who own them: their interfaces are your dependencies, and what the Surface needs of them is your case to make.

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 a small, focused team of contract engineering resources who build the Surface. This role is global in scope: the Surface serves every infrastructure engineer Sentinel reaches, across every business line Sentinel serves. You will work with those engineers directly to understand their requirements and to take their feedback on board, and alongside the Customer Experience teams outside Sentinel whose craft and standards the Surface draws on. You are the face of Sentinel: for most of its users the Surface is the platform, and their judgment of one is their judgment of the other.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

SURFACE OWNERSHIP

You own the interface through which Pfizer’s infrastructure engineers use Sentinel:

• Product and Experience Ownership: You are accountable for Sentinel Surface end to end — what it does, how it behaves and how it feels to use — from the definition of the experience through to what ships. You hold the line between simple and patronising: the Surface makes the common path effortless without concealing what a competent engineer needs to see, and without walking an expert through a workflow designed for a novice.
• Architecture Ownership: You own the Surface’s architecture and the decisions that set it: how it is composed, how it holds and refreshes state, how it behaves when a component it depends on is slow, stale or unavailable, and how it stays maintainable as the platform’s surface area grows. Security is an architectural property here rather than a later review: the Surface does not itself hold authorisation for the actions it offers — that sits with the systems it calls — so it has to understand the authorisation models in use and reflect them faithfully in what it presents and permits, and it audits the actions taken within it. The contract engineers build it; you are accountable for it being right.
• Design Ownership: You own the design direction — the information architecture, the interaction patterns and the design system the Surface is built from — and you set the standard the work is held to, judging it rigorously whether the craft comes from your own hands or from Customer Experience partners.
• Technical Credibility: You lead the delivery, architecture and design of the Surface; the contract team builds it. You may well be hands-on where it is the fastest way to settle a question — prototyping an interaction, spiking an approach, reviewing or writing code — but the role is not measured by what you build yourself, and that work never displaces the leadership the team and the stakeholders need from you. You bring a working command of front end architecture, application programming interface (API) design, performance and accessibility: enough to hold a real design discussion with the engineers who write the code, to question an estimate, probe a design decision, and tell a considered answer from a plausible one.

CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING

You go to the engineers who use Sentinel rather than waiting for them to come to you:

• Direct Customer Engagement: You work directly with infrastructure engineers across Pfizer to understand how they work, what they are trying to achieve and where Sentinel could do more to deliver successful outcomes for them, whether that means new capability or removing something that slows them down. You run discovery yourself rather than receiving it second hand, and you know the difference between what a user asks for and what they need.
• Feedback Loops: You establish the routes by which feedback reaches the Surface team and the discipline that closes them: instrumented usage, usability testing, structured research, and the unstructured complaint that turns out to matter. You are explicit with users about what you have changed as a result, and about what you have not and why.
• Measurable Design Decisions: You make design decisions from evidence rather than assertion, and you define how each significant one will be measured before it ships — whether engineers complete what they came to do, where they get stuck or fall back to another route, and what they tell you about it. You take considered risks where the evidence runs out, and you say plainly which of the two you are acting on.

DELIVERY

You lead the build of Sentinel Surface and the delivery of the roadmap behind it:

• Roadmap Ownership: You own the delivery roadmap for Sentinel Surface, sequencing capability against the demand the platform and its users place on it, anticipating the components and service types the Surface will have to present as Sentinel grows, and keeping the plan honest as priorities change.
• Contract Team Leadership: You lead a small, focused team of contract engineering resources who build the Surface, setting technical direction, quality expectations and priorities, working alongside them through architecture and design, and ensuring the effort is appropriately resourced to meet the deliverables and timescale commitments.
• Quality and Release Discipline: You define what done means for the Surface — functional, performance, accessibility and resilience — and hold the team to it. You own the release approach and the confidence it gives you to ship often without breaking the people who depend on it.
• Dependency and Risk Management: You surface dependencies early — on the Service Catalog, on the Asset Inventory, on the platforms and teams whose interfaces the Surface consumes — 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 rather than waiting for a user to find it.

PLATFORM INTEGRATION

The Surface consumes Sentinel’s components rather than reproducing them, and you own how it uses them:

• Service Catalog Consumption: You work with the Service Catalog as the definitive list of infrastructure and services that can be managed by Sentinel Surface, and you define how the Surface presents it: how the catalog is browsed, searched and understood by an engineer who knows exactly what they want and by one who does not yet.
• Asset Inventory Consumption: You work with the Asset Inventory as the source of truth for what has been deployed, and you present that record honestly, including its latency and provenance. The Surface does not imply a currency or a certainty the underlying data does not have.
• Interface Contracts: You define what the Surface needs of the components it consumes — coverage, shape, latency and reliability — and you negotiate those contracts with the teams who own them, shaping their roadmaps by making the case rather than retrofitting the Surface around whatever arrives.
• Cross-Team Facilitation: You convene and run detailed technical working sessions with Sentinel engineering, the component teams and the Customer Experience teams, taking them to real decisions rather than status updates, and you navigate the politics of aligning teams that carry their own priorities and commitments.

PEOPLE

You are the most visible part of the platform, and you build the relationships the Surface depends on:

• Face of Sentinel: For most of its users the Surface is Sentinel, and you represent the platform accordingly — in user sessions, demonstrations, forums and escalations. You carry the vision and purpose of Sentinel credibly, and you absorb criticism of it without deflecting or defending reflexively.
• Customer Experience Partnership: You build a genuine working partnership with the Customer Experience teams outside Sentinel, drawing on their craft and standards, contributing back to them, and resolving the tension between an established convention and what this particular audience actually needs.
• Multi-Audience Communication: You influence through communication at all levels, from an individual engineer in a design critique to executive stakeholders in a Digital Leadership Team (DLT) review, and you handle difficult conversations skillfully.
• Stakeholder Partnership: You build durable working relationships across globally distributed organizations and teams: Sentinel platform engineering and its component teams, the Technical Architecture team, the Product Ownership team, the Customer Experience teams, and the infrastructure engineering communities the Surface serves. 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 how engineers really work and what better interfaces elsewhere are doing; sponsors experiments in interaction and agentic assistance; brings new approaches back into the roadmap rather than admiring them from a distance
• Own the Outcome: Holds the experience as personally owned, including where the data or service behind it belongs to another team; treats a user’s failed deployment as their problem to fix and their design to change
• Be Polymath Oriented: Champions cross-disciplinary learning; works comfortably across interaction design, front end engineering, cloud infrastructure and AI domains; translates specialized knowledge into accessible explanations; thinks like a business insider
• Communicate with Precision: Specifies interactions, states and interface contracts exactly rather than approximately; is explicit about latency and provenance in what the Surface shows; mentors others on precise communication; spans C-level executives to frontline engineers
• Think in Systems: Reasons about the journey end to end, from an engineer’s intent to the provisioned service and back to what the Surface reports; 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 7+ years of relevant experience building and owning customer-facing surfaces for technical users, including substantial time accountable for the delivery, architecture and design of a product interface in production. Clearly evidenced experience of creating surfaces in a comparable context — technical practitioners as the audience and a complex system behind the interface — and a proven track record of leading engineering delivery through resources that did not report to you.

EXPERT-LEVEL SKILLS

• Building Customer Surfaces: You have built and owned interfaces that real customers use, and you can evidence them: what you shipped, who used it, and what changed as a result.
• Experience Design for Technical Users: You design for practitioners. You make the common path simple without hiding what an expert needs, and you know where that line sits because you have misjudged it before and corrected it.
• Delivery, Architecture and Design Leadership: You carry all three for the same product and hold them in balance, rather than letting the one you enjoy most set the agenda.
• Customer Engagement and Feedback: You go to users directly, run discovery and usability work, and turn what you hear into design decisions rather than into a backlog of requests.
• Cross-Organizational Communication: You work across organizational lines and stakeholders to communicate a product vision credibly, from individual engineers to executive stakeholders.

PRACTITIONER-LEVEL SKILLS

• Front End Architecture and Engineering: You are comfortable with modern front end architecture — component models, state management, build and test tooling, and the performance considerations that decide whether an interface feels fast — enough to review a design and challenge it.
• Design Systems and Interaction Design: You work fluently with design systems and the tooling around them, and you can produce or critique information architecture, interaction design and prototypes at a professional standard.
• Accessibility Standards: You know the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and what conformance means in practice for an interface of this kind.
• Cloud and Infrastructure Workflows: You understand how infrastructure engineers work in AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP, including resource and tagging models, identity and access, and infrastructure as code, well enough to design for them credibly.
• Security in Privileged Interfaces: You have designed interfaces that front privileged operations. You understand single sign-on and role based access control well enough to represent someone else’s authorisation model faithfully in an interface, and you know what a credible audit trail of user action looks like.
• Application Programming Interfaces and Distributed Data: You understand API design and consumption, latency budgets, caching and eventual consistency, and what it takes to present data that is authoritative but not instantaneous.
• AI and Agent Literacy: You understand large language models and agent frameworks well enough to follow and challenge a design, and to judge where agentic assistance belongs in an interface and where it does not.
• Stakeholder Navigation: You work effectively across organizational boundaries and competing agendas without losing the technical thread.

WORKING-LEVEL SKILLS

• Product Analytics and Instrumentation: You can instrument a surface and read what its usage is telling you, and you know when a metric is flattering the product rather than describing it.
• Financial Operations (FinOps): You understand cloud cost models well enough to partner credibly where the Surface exposes cost, attribution or optimisation to its users.
• Time Management and Deep Work: You carry a broad portfolio of users, components and stakeholders without dropping threads, and protect the focus time that real design and architecture work requires.

ORGANIZATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Digital: Sentinel Platform Engineering, including the Service Catalog and Asset Inventory component teams, Platforms and Lifecycle Operations team, Technical Architecture, Product Ownership, Financial Operations (FinOps), SparkPro and other 8 Platforms Teams

Customer Experience and design teams outside Sentinel, as partners in the craft and standards the Surface is held to

Infrastructure engineers across Pfizer, as the direct users of Sentinel Surface, engaged directly for requirements, research and feedback

Business lines served by Sentinel, including Research and Development (R&D) and Pfizer Global Supply (PGS)

Senior Business Stakeholders and Digital Leadership Team (DLT)

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 the Surface exposes cost and attribution to its users, but spend accountability sits outside the role.

Supervision

No direct colleague reports. A small, focused team of contingent (contract) engineering resources led to build Sentinel Surface. Significant matrix influence over the Sentinel component teams whose interfaces the Surface consumes, over the Customer Experience teams outside Sentinel, and over partner platform teams whose services the Surface presents.

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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