Associate Director, Platform Engineering & Operations

We invite you to consider an opportunity with Denali to help achieve our goal of delivering meaningful therapeutics to patients. This role calls for a leader who sets the operational agenda, anticipates risks and opportunities, and brings them forward with a considered point of view. The successful candidate builds the management structures, operating cadences, and accountability mechanisms their team needs to execute reliably, and sustains operational standards through periods of change, attrition, or competing priorities.

They exercise independent operational judgment, take ownership of outcomes, and lead through clarity of expectations, professional managerial standards, and accountability. They contribute an operational perspective to emerging strategies, including AI infrastructure. They manage a multidisciplinary team of employees, consultants, and contractors, with the function expected to scale alongside Denali’s South San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Zurich operational footprint.

Key Responsibilities   Leadership & Architectural Partnership Lead IT Infrastructure as a function, owning the operational agenda, operating rhythms, and standards by which the team executes Build and maintain the management structures, operating cadences, escalation paths, and accountability mechanisms required for reliable delivery Anticipate operational risks, capacity constraints, attrition, and capability gaps, and act in advance of service impact Operate Platform Engineering decisions within architectural standards and governance forums set by Architecture, including the Architecture Review Board (ARB) for decisions of architectural significance; bring operational experience into architectural decisions and execute engineering work within architectural intent Represent Platform Engineering & Operations to peer functions at the appropriate working level; contribute operational perspective and recommendations to enterprise platform strategy, including AI infrastructure, FinOps, and modernization   Service Management & Resilience Execute the unified Change Advisory Board (CAB) process integrating IT, SOX, and GxP change control, with leadership oversight on judgment calls of strategic or compliance significance; continuously mature change control as a strategic mechanism for risk-managed delivery Prepare and deliver Platforms-area content, analysis, and follow-through for the Quarterly Service Review (QSR) led by the Senior Director Execute DR and BCP across platforms, including runbooks, failover testing, recovery validation, and RTO/RPO compliance; maintain DR/BCP as a continuously verified operational capability Support the platform layer underpinning OT and manufacturing IT systems in partnership with the Manufacturing IT lead and Technical Operations Partner with business and operational stakeholders during platform incidents or degradation events to evaluate operational impact, coordinate temporary workarounds, support continuity procedures, and prioritize restoration activities aligned to business risk and criticality   Platform Services & Enterprise AI Infrastructure Lead delivery and operation of Denali’s enterprise observability and integration platforms (e.g., Workato) as shared services, in partnership with Product as the primary business-facing consumer Evolve the team toward a platform engineering model with end-to-end lifecycle ownership, including Platform Engineer and Platform Reliability Engineer roles, governed by architectural standards Lead the operational ramp of newly deployed enterprise platforms (e.g., SAP, MES, clinical data platforms) from project handoff into sustained operations Lead operational delivery of the shared platform layer that supports enterprise AI, including runtime, controls, model access, monitoring, and operational governance Deliver and operate validated infrastructure for AI workloads that touch regulated workflows, including security and integration architecture for safely