Senior Associate - Software Engineer

Role Summary

Pfizer's digital and data-first strategy guides the work. You will help implement innovative technology solutions across functions from research to manufacturing, digitizing drug discovery and development, identifying innovative solutions, and streamlining processes to improve outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Apply your skills and knowledge to support work within the team, making decisions to resolve moderately complex problems within guidelines and policies.
• Use your judgment to modify methods and techniques as needed.
• Develop and maintain robust software solutions, including coding, testing, debugging, documentation, and implementation.
• Collaborate with technical resources and end-users to enhance system robustness and usability.
• Understand and interpret business needs to develop prototypes, recommend improvements, and devise innovative solutions, while documenting and transferring knowledge to colleagues.
• Delivery: Own feature delivery from design through deployment, making sound technical trade-offs to ship value on time.
• AI: Integrate AI capabilities into solutions, critically evaluate AI-generated code, and never ship code you don't understand.
• People: Mentor junior engineers on technical topics, contribute to hiring through interviews, and actively build team knowledge.
• Business: Translate business needs into technical solutions, manage stakeholder expectations, and articulate technical decisions in business terms.
• Process: Contribute to process improvement, maintain team workflows, and coordinate with adjacent team members.
• Documentation: Create clear documentation for features you build, contribute to team knowledge bases, and update docs proactively.

Skills

• AI-Augmented Development: You integrate AI tools strategically into your development workflow. You review AI-generated code with the same rigor as human code and never ship code you don't fully understand.
• Business Immersion: You apply deep domain knowledge to technical solutions, bridge business and technology conversations fluently, speak the domain language naturally, and shadow operations to build understanding.
• Data Integration: You integrate multiple data sources independently, clean messy datasets, handle inconsistent formats and missing values, and document data lineage. You troubleshoot integration failures.
• Full-Stack Development: You deliver complete features end-to-end independently—frontend, backend, database, and infrastructure (CloudFormation/Terraform). You make pragmatic technology choices and deploy what you build.
• Multi-Audience Communication: You present complex topics clearly to any audience, facilitate productive discussions, translate between technical and business language fluidly, and write compelling proposals and specifications.
• Problem Discovery: You navigate ambiguous problem spaces independently. You discover requirements through observation and user shadowing, reframe problems to find higher-value solutions, and distinguish symptoms from root causes.
• Rapid Prototyping & Validation: You deliver working solutions rapidly (days not weeks). You use prototypes to build stakeholder trust, know when to stop prototyping and start productionizing, and balance speed with appropriate quality.
• Site Reliability Engineering: You design observability strategies for your services, lead incident response, implement resilience testing, and conduct blameless post-mortems. You balance reliability investment with feature velocity.
• Front End / US Experience with React, Angular, or Vue: Ability to build simple, intuitive user interfaces for analytics applications, Understanding of UX principles for data-heavy applications.
• AI Evaluation & Verification: You apply systematic evaluation criteria to AI outputs, understand common AI failure modes (hallucination, bias, outdated training data), and question AI outputs rather than accepting them.
• AI Literacy: You explain the difference between ML models, rule-based systems, and generative AI. You identify potential AI applications in your work and understand common AI limitations and failure modes.
• Architecture & Design: You explain and apply common patterns (MVC, microservices, event-driven) to familiar problems. You contribute to design discussions and identify when existing patterns don't fit.
• Cloud Platforms: You deploy applications to cloud platforms and use common services (compute, storage, databases, queues). You understand cloud pricing and basic security configuration.
• Code Quality & Review: You write readable, well-structured code. You use linting tools, write basic unit tests, and participate constructively in code reviews—both giving and receiving feedback.
• Developer Experience: You create friction logs documenting developer pain points. You write getting-started guides and contribute to improving existing golden paths based on user feedback.
• DevOps & CI/CD: You configure basic CI/CD pipelines, understand containerization (Docker), and can troubleshoot common build and deployment failures.
• Knowledge Management: You create searchable knowledge articles proactively, maintain team documentation, and organize information so others can find it.
• Lean Thinking & Flow: You map workflows to identify bottlenecks, apply basic lean techniques (WIP limits, pull systems), and suggest process improvements for your work.
• Pattern Generalization: You identify patterns across multiple implementations and propose candidates for generalization. You understand the trade-offs between custom and reusable solutions.
• Service Management: You document services you own, participate in service reviews, handle basic service requests, and understand SLAs for your services.
• Technical Debt Management: You document technical debt with context and business impact, contribute to prioritization discussions, and address debt in code you touch.
• Technical Writing: You write clear READMEs, inline documentation, and technical guides. You update existing docs when making changes and ensure documentation matches implementation.

Qualifications

• Required: Must have a Bachelor’s degree with two years of relevant experience; OR Master’s degree with one year of relevant experience; OR Associate's degree with six years of relevant experience; OR eight years of relevant experience with a high school diploma or equivalent
• Required: Demonstrated successful delivery of experiences using Agile development, especially scaled agile and lean techniques and methodologies
• Required: Proficiency in writing software in an object-oriented language
• Required: Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Preferred: Working knowledge of Commercial Data / Pharma
• Preferred: Commercial Analytics systems (Forecasting, market research, Brand Launches)
• Preferred: Working with Data Product, Agentic / ML models

Additional Requirements

• Work Location Assignment: Must be able to work from the assigned Pfizer office 2-3 days per week, or as needed by the business.