Director, Principal Engineer, Developer Surfaces

Use Your Power for Purpose
The vision for Pfizer’s Digital function is a more integrated and coordinated healthcare model that improves patient outcomes, fuels tomorrow’s breakthrough therapies, and brings medicines to patients faster.

Within Platform Engineering, the Spark Pro team builds and runs Pfizer’s internal developer platform — the paved road that lets any engineering team take an idea from a laptop to production in minutes, whether that’s a web application, an autonomous agent, or an MCP server.

Developers reach that platform through several surfaces — native Mac and Windows desktop apps, web-based tooling, and programmatic MCP interfaces — each built and owned by strong, independent engineering teams.

This role sits inside that team, bringing coherence across the desktop, web, and MCP surfaces without slowing down the engineers who already own each one.

Our vision is to innovate and engineer breakthrough digital products to power business performance and transform global health. We do this through our culture of agile, fast-adapting and pioneer working.

What You Will Achieve

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Developer Surfaces Lead who will be accountable for the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of Spark Pro’s developer surfaces — desktop, web, and MCP.

In this technical leadership role, you will act as the executor and the visionary behind the surfaces’ technical direction. Rather than leading a single team, you will lead through influence across the experienced engineers who already own each surface, reconciling differing approaches into one coherent direction and ensuring a successful delivery of high-quality developer experiences from inception to completion. This role requires exceptional technical knowledge, hands-on credibility in the Electron and Vue desktop codebase, and the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams while sharing responsibility with the engineers driving each surface.

You will also be accountable for delivery of security-and privacy-first capabilities while creating an environment where engineers can do their best work as measured by a quarterly Developer’s Experience survey, and alignment and contribution to the service network and technical engineering standards.

Key Responsibilities

A normal work week consists of leading one or more teams of engineers to deliver and implement technical solutions, following your design approach to meet your assigned program objectives and KPIs. You will also collaborate closely and often with your program lead, Digital Lead, and Product Owners, to ensure that technical decisions and their implementation align with broader strategic priorities.

You represent engineering in program and stakeholder meetings, as such you’ll need to be able to think on your feet: provide consultation, identify risks based on a variety of factors, and rely on your past experiences to identify potential solutions and develop ballpark estimates.

In many situations you will be working with technology that is new to Pfizer and requires you to learn quickly, be able to read and understand documentation, and architect robust and scalable solutions that align with our business objectives.

Using influence more than authority, you will lead teams of engineers on the implementation of the solution. Individual members of the team are responsible for delivering on their commitments, but the team supports each other. The team pride themselves on the quality of their code, our delivery practices and breadth of our test coverage. You will be expected to document your work.

Key responsibilities for a Principal Engineer are listed below:

Technical Leadership

• Serve as the top technical authority across the developer surfaces — Mac, Windows, web, and MCP — making decisions on technology choices, design approaches, solution architecture and implementation.

• Lead and oversee the entire lifecycle excellence of engineering projects, ensuring alignment with architectural vision and adherence to best practices.

• Responsible for maintaining good code quality by promoting and ensuring secure code hygiene.

• Responsible for guiding the correct configuration of SaaS solutions to ensure security and compliance.

• Build a team able to manage change. Take appropriate risks to achieve the desired results, balancing risks to stability and current norms versus the need for constant change, improvement, and simplification.

• Facilitate the conversation between Enterprise Architects, Business Architects, Vendors and Developers, by providing technical clarity on solution(s) to build and code to write, move content from ideation into delivery to move from concept to reality.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Act asa translator between business stakeholders and technical engineers, to ensure that technical, security and privacy considerations are represented in strategic discussions and business objectives are being met by our solutions.

• Align objectives, dependencies, and schedules across multiple teams to keep teams unblocked, and to ensure seamless projects execution.

• Collaborate with other Principal Engineers, and through the Principal Engineers Forum, to share best practices, quality standards, address improvement areas, and ensure effective communication of information.

• Collaborate with security teams to monitor vulnerabilities, implement defences, and ensure compliance with security best practices.

• Collaborate with digital operations and support to ensure smooth BAU operations.

Excellence by Design

• Continuously discover, define, architect, deliver, and enable solutions that support program OKRs.

• Offer deep technical expertise, providing insights and guidance, ensuring solutions are secure, compliant, scalable, maintainable, and efficient.

• Advocate for the adoption of best practices, new technologies, automation, and continuous improvement initiatives in both technical and privacy domains.

• Foster a DevOps model of success by building a culture of shared responsibilities and transparency leading to higher quality and quicker delivery of outcomes.

• Stay updated on emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices, and apply this knowledge to improve engineering processes and drive innovation within the organization.

• Ensure that privacy and security are an integral part of the system design, not merely layered on.

Coaching & Mentorship

• Participate in or lead code reviews, where applicable.

• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, facilitate knowledge sharing and taking an active role in supporting the development of the wider team and their careers. Foster a culture of excellence, innovation, and continuous learning within the engineering team.

• Act on Developer Experience (DX) survey findings and feedback from the engineering team members, to drive continuous improvement initiatives to increase the “Ease of Delivery” of the team.

People Management & Development

• This role has no direct reports — you lead through influence, setting technical direction for the engineers who already own each surface.

• Mentor and coach engineers across each surface, and build consensus among strong, independent contributors.

• Support Pfizer's Diversity and Inclusion objectives, as applicable

Incident Management & Recovery

• Lead or assist in the response to security incidents, ensuring rapid containment, mitigation, and recovery.

• Lead troubleshooting during operational outages, guiding the team to diagnose and resolve issues quickly.

• Work towards system resilience and implement post-mortem analyses to identify root causes and prevent future incidents.

• Ensure that solutions are designed with data privacy considerations from the outset.

Required Skills & Knowledge

In order to fulfil the responsibilities listed above, we expect that you possess and demonstrate:

• Extensive experience in software engineering, with a focus on leading complex projects.

• Deep technical expertise from a well-documented background as a senior-level engineer.

• Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities, with a keen attention to detail.

• A broad technical knowledge across frontend, desktop, and backend systems — comfortable across the full stack while leaning primarily frontend, as a genuine full-stack generalist.

• Proven technical leadership skills, mentorship, with the ability to motivate and inspire team members and fellow engineers towards achieving common goals.

• Exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to communicate effectively in a matrix environment with geographically distributed resources, and establish strong partnerships with senior non-technical stakeholders, with a talent to explain complex topics simply.

• Ability to influence and work with cross-functional teams to deliver complex projects in accordance with broader strategies.

• Deep understanding of software development methodologies and best practices for implementing principles of privacy & security ‘by design’.

• Understanding of the implications, regulations, and best practices of data handling in the pharmaceutical industry.

• Understanding of the DevSecOps best practices that should be in place, driving an “Everything as Code instead of paperwork” mentality.

• Familiarity with the multiple policies, standards, systems, and organizations within the pharmaceutical industry, to minimize risk of challenges or duplication in implementation.

Qualifications & Education Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• Minimum of 8+ years’ experience in frontend, desktop, or developer tooling engineering, with increasing responsibility delivering digital solutions, products, and services.

• Professional certifications in engineering leadership are a plus.

• Demonstrable experience operating in a DevOps environment.

• Proven capability handling large scale, enterprise software delivery in a global 24/7 environment.

At a technical level, we are looking for engineers with qualifications and expertise in the following areas:

• Experience driving and participating in technical discovery to architect and deliver solutions that meet program business objectives.

• Systems thinking experience demonstrated by architecting complex solutions that require integrating multiple solutions.

• Demonstrated hands-on experience building and shipping developer-facing tools across more than one surface, ideally including Electron and Vue.

• Understanding of CI/CD practices, RESTful APIs, integration patterns, microservice patterns and other areas of interest to modern software development.

• Experience with the Model Context Protocol or comparable programmatic interface standards for AI agents and scripts.

• Excellent experience with Agile team processes, including Scrum and Kanban delivery - we enjoy working with lean methods.

• Experience with the types of process problems that come when trying to build complex, new applications and comfortable when things are uncertain and require problem solving.

• Excellent experience estimating complex technical stories and breaking them down.

• Strong written and spoken English with excellent asynchronous collaboration and communication.

We don't expect you to know everything, but we want people who are open to learning new things.

Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.
Work Location Assignment: Hybrid

The annual base salary for this position ranges from $176,600.00 to $294,300.00. In addition, this position is eligible for participation in Pfizer’s Global Performance Plan with a bonus target of 20.0% of the base salary and eligibility to participate in our share based long term incentive program. We offer comprehensive and generous benefits and programs to help our colleagues lead healthy lives and to support each of life’s moments. Benefits offered include a 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution, paid vacation, holiday and personal days, paid caregiver/parental and medical leave, and health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage. Learn more at Pfizer Candidate Site – U.S. Benefits | (uscandidates.mypfizerbenefits.com). Pfizer compensation structures and benefit packages are aligned based on the location of hire. The United States salary range provided does not apply to Tampa, FL or any location outside of the United States.

This role is posted in multiple locations. If you are applying for the role in an secondary job posting location where pay transparency regulations apply, your Talent Advisor will share the local pay information with you during the first interview.

Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

Candidates must be authorized to be employed in the U.S. by any employer.

U.S. work visa sponsorship (such as TN, O-1, H-1B, etc.) is not available for this role now or in the future.

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.

Information & Business Tech

About Us

A career at Pfizer offers opportunity, ownership and impact.

All over the world, Pfizer colleagues work together to positively impact health for everyone, everywhere. Our colleagues have the opportunity to grow and develop a career that offers both individual and company success; be part of an ownership culture that values diversity and where all colleagues are energized and engaged; and the ability to impact the health and lives of millions of people. Pfizer, a global leader in the bio pharmaceutical industry, is continuously seeking top talent who are inspired by our purpose to innovate to bring therapies to patients that significantly improve their lives.