Senior Director, R&D & Capital Strategy Lead

Role Summary

The Senior Director, Global Workplace Experience (GWE), R&D & Capital Strategy Lead, reports to the Senior Vice President, GWE and leads the strategy, governance, and performance of Pfizer’s global R&D workplace and capital portfolio. The role oversees regulated and non-regulated research facilities, clinical manufacturing, vivarium, and a complex capital program, ensuring delivery to scope, schedule, budget, regulatory standards, and design requirements. It provides executive leadership to align facilities, services, investments, and talent with enterprise priorities to support approximately 12,000 R&D colleagues and Pfizer’s R&D strategy.

Responsibilities

• Enterprise Strategy & Governance: Establish and refresh the Strategic Master Plan for R&D workplaces and set enterprise-level vision and governance for workplace operations, services, and infrastructure across a multi-site, multi-regulatory environment (GxP/GMP and non-GxP), including EH&S.
• Executive advisory: Serve as an executive advisor to senior R&D and enterprise leadership on workplace strategy, capacity, risk, and investment trade-offs.
• Sustainability: Set the enterprise strategy for sustainability across R&D workplaces, defining policies, standards, and governance needed to advance Pfizer’s Net Zero Carbon goals.
• Operational Excellence & Risk Stewardship: Ensure uninterrupted, compliant operations of critical R&D infrastructure; identify, evaluate, and mitigate operational, regulatory, and infrastructure risks; lead crisis management and incident response; develop a multi-year decarbonization roadmap for all R&D sites, including energy transformation, building efficiency, clean-tech adoption, and Scope 1–3 emissions reduction initiatives.
• Financial Stewardship & Value Creation: Own and deliver financial performance across OPEX and CAPEX; drive productivity, cost discipline, and long-term value realization; provide executive-level financial transparency and investment rationale.
• Executive Partnership & Stakeholder Leadership: Build and maintain trusted partnerships across R&D, GWS, PX, Finance, Digital, EHS, Security, and Compliance; influence executive leadership and site councils; balance competing enterprise priorities with data-driven decision-making.
• Portfolio & Service Oversight: Provide executive oversight of a broad portfolio of workplace services, including facility operations and maintenance, capital project delivery, utilities and critical infrastructure, R&D equipment services, EHS/Security/Crisis Management, vivarium, grounds, and colleague experience offerings; ensure services are delivered with safety, quality, compliance, cost efficiency, and engagement; build sustainability capability across teams and partners.
• Leadership, Talent & Culture: Lead and inspire a high-performing organization; build leadership depth, foster accountability, inclusion, innovation, and continuous improvement; drive engagement and change leadership during transformation.
• Vendor & Partner Ecosystem Management: Set governance for Facility Management providers and external partners; drive vendor performance and accountability; leverage scale to create organizational advantage across PX, GWE, R&D, and enabling functions.
• Capital & Project Leadership: Provide executive oversight for a complex portfolio of capital projects; ensure adherence to scope, schedule, budget, regulatory requirements, and design standards; lead multi-year capital portfolio planning; evaluate tradeoffs between internal investment, partnerships, outsourcing, and technology; apply portfolio analytics and space planning to inform decisions; ensure carbon impact analysis and sustainability targets.

Qualifications

• Required: Bachelor’s degree in engineering, science or relevant technical field
• Required: 12+ years relevant work experience
• Required: 3 years direct facilities operations, capital management, and project execution, preferably in pharmaceutical labs or manufacturing industries
• Required: Experience navigating a large organization and managing multiple stakeholder interests on global, complex projects or operations
• Required: Strong business acumen and professionalism with the ability to interact effectively with colleagues in all functional areas, including Senior Leadership
• Required: Excellent oral, written and overall communication skills
• Required: Outstanding project management and organizational skills
• Required: Ability to influence and motivate others without express authority
• Required: Highly developed team leadership skills and the ability to manage internal/external resources to achieve project objectives; ability to identify business issues/opportunities and to frame business questions
• Required: Discretion and the ability to deal with confidential information
• Required: Track record of strong networking/influencing skills and for working collaboratively with others across functions and markets
• Required: Embraces, supports and leads change
• Required: Advanced Microsoft Office capabilities, particularly Excel, PowerPoint, and Word
• Required: Advanced technical capabilities, CADD, CMMS, CAFM and other facilities management systems
• Preferred: MBA
• Preferred: Pharmaceutical management experience

Additional Requirements

• Travel: Domestic and international travel may be required (approximately 30%).
• Work location: Hybrid – onsite an average of 2.5 days per week or as the business requires.