Senior Associate - Software Engineer

Role Summary

Senior Associate - Software Engineer. In this role at Pfizer, you will contribute to delivering innovative technology solutions across functions—from research to manufacturing—as part of Pfizer’s digital and data-first strategy. You will help digitize drug discovery and development, identify innovative solutions, and streamline processes to make a significant impact on lives.

Responsibilities

• 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

• Don't Lose Your Curiosity: Proactively investigates root causes; experiments with new technologies and AI capabilities; protects time for exploration; treats failure as learning; discovers requirements through immersion in problem spaces
• Own the Outcome: Takes end-to-end ownership of features and business outcomes; accepts technical debt intentionally when it accelerates value; builds trust through rapid delivery of working solutions; owns stakeholder relationships; balances quality with delivery speed
• Be Polymath Oriented: Applies knowledge from one domain to inform decisions in another; studies adjacent fields like design, business, or science; begins learning domain language of business partners
• Communicate with Precision: Writes clear documentation and specifications; reduces ambiguity in requirements; crafts effective prompts for AI tools; adapts communication style for different audiences
• Think in Systems: Identifies upstream and downstream impacts; uses observability tools to trace requests across services; understands feedback loops; maps dependencies before making changes
• 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: Must be able to work from the assigned Pfizer office 2-3 days per week, or as needed by the business