Lead Solutions Engineer

Job title: Lead Solutions Engineer
About The Job
Ready to push the limits of what’s possible? Join Sanofi in one of our corporate functions and you can play a vital part in the performance of our entire business while helping to make an impact on millions around the world.
Join Sanofi as our Lead Solutions Engineer to shape the future of pharmaceutical technology. Reporting to the Head of Solutions Engineering, you will serve as the technical lead for our Solutions Engineering practice and collaborate with Strategic Architecture and digital partners to drive Sanofi’s transformation into an AI-powered biopharmaceutical company.
This is a full-stack engineering role that combines hands-on expertise in cloud, DevOps, containers, and AI infrastructure with strategic vision-setting. You will lead solution design discussions with Digital R&D, Manufacturing, and Corporate teams, and establish technical patterns and standards to guide our global technology evolution.
About Sanofi
We’re an R&D-driven, AI-powered biopharma company committed to improving people’s lives and delivering compelling growth. Our deep understanding of the immune system – and innovative pipeline – enables us to invent medicines and vaccines that treat and protect millions of people around the world. Together, we chase the miracles of science to improve people’s lives.
This is a hybrid role with 3 days a week onsite in Hyderabad - required. **
Main Responsibilities
Hands-On Technical Implementation (70%)
Cloud-Native Architecture & Implementation
Design and implement hybrid cloud solutions on AWS and Azure for pharmaceutical workloads.
Architect containerized applications using Kubernetes (EKS/AKS) with enterprise-grade reliability.
Build Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for rapid, consistent deployments.
Implement cloud-native patterns (microservices, serverless, and event-driven) that support pharmaceutical compliance.
AI/ML Infrastructure Deployment
Deploy and optimize AI/ML infrastructure supporting drug discovery and manufacturing automation.
Implement AIOps platforms for intelligent infrastructure monitoring and automated operations.
Build data pipelines and model serving infrastructure for pharmaceutical AI applications.
Design GPU-optimized clusters and distributed computing environments for machine learning workloads.
DevOps & Automation Excellence
Implement CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, and compliance validation.
Design observability platforms that provide comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting.
Build self-service automation enabling digital teams to deploy infrastructure safely and rapidly.
Establish GitOps practices and automated rollback mechanisms for pharmaceutical production systems.
Hybrid Infrastructure Integration
Design seamless integrations between on-premises pharmaceutical systems and cloud platforms.
Build disaster recovery and business continuity solutions meeting pharmaceutical regulatory requirements.
Optimize hybrid cloud costs through FinOps practices and automated resource management.
Lead Strategic Technology Vision (30%)
Digital Partner Solution Design
Lead technical architecture discussions with Digital R&D, Manufacturing, and Corporate peer organizations.
Provide consultative guidance on cloud, AI, and infrastructure strategies for critical pharmaceutical initiatives.
Co-design enterprise solutions that balance innovation speed with GxP compliance requirements.
Translate business challenges into technical solutions aligned with Sanofi’s AI transformation roadmap.
Architecture Partnership & Governance
Work closely with Enterprise Architecture on strategic technology initiatives and standards development.
Provide solution-level architectural decisions in line with enterprise architectural standards.
Contribute to architectural decision frameworks for cloud, AI, and infrastructure domains.
Aligning foundational technology capabilities with digital innovation requirements across the organization.
Solutions Engineering Practice Development
Define technical patterns, standards, and best practices for the emerging Solutions Engineering team.
Establish solution design methodologies that balance pharmaceutical compliance with innovation speed.
Participate in hiring and developing additional Solutions Engineers across specialized domains.
Create technical documentation, reference architecture, and implementation guides.
AIOps & Intelligent Operations Leadership
Design and promote AIOps capabilities for infrastructure and DevOps automation.
Oversee implementation of intelligent monitoring, predictive analytics, and automated remediation. Collaborate with the agentic AI core team to integrate AI-powered operations into the pharmaceutical technology stack.
Drive adoption of ML-powered capacity planning, anomaly detection, and self-healing systems.
About You
Required Experience:
Cloud & Infrastructure Expertise
8+ years in enterprise infrastructure and engineering roles with increasing technical leadership
Deep expertise in AWS and Azure with production-scale implementations
Advanced Kubernetes experience, including EKS/AKS in enterprise pharmaceutical or regulated environments.
Hybrid cloud architecture integrating on-premises systems with cloud-native applications.
Infrastructure fundamentals, including networking, storage, compute, and security at enterprise scale.
DevOps & Automation Mastery
Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent tools at scale.
CI/CD pipeline design, including automated testing, security scanning, and compliance validation.
Container orchestration with production Kubernetes implementations and cloud-native patterns
Observability platform experience, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and distributed tracing.
Strategic & Consultative Leadership
Cross-functional collaboration guiding technical decisions across diverse business and technology teams.
Standards development, creating technical patterns, and best practices adopted across organizations.
Stakeholder communication, translating technical concepts for business leaders and non-technical audiences.
Highly Valued Experience
Hands-on AI/ML infrastructure deployment, including model serving, training clusters, and data pipelines.
AIOps implementation experience on AWS (CloudWatch Insights, Systems Manager, DevOps Guru, or equivalent)
ML platform operations with experience in SageMaker, Azure ML, or similar enterprise ML platforms
Intelligent automation, including predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and automated remediation.
Pharmaceutical or life sciences technology implementation with GxP compliance understanding
Regulated industry background (healthcare, financial services, government) with validation experience
Large-scale digital transformations in organizations with 10,000+ users
Multi-cloud governance and FinOps implementation with measurable cost optimization outcomes
Site Reliability Engineering practices, including error budgets, SLOs, and incident management.
Open-source contributions to cloud-native, Kubernetes, or AI/ML infrastructure projects
Essential Capabilities
Technical Leadership
Lead complex technical discussions with confidence and credibility across diverse stakeholder groups.
Challenge technical assumptions constructively while respecting domain expertise.
Balance innovation adoption with operational stability and pharmaceutical compliance.
Make sound architectural decisions in the face of ambiguity and incomplete information.
Strategic Thinking
Connect technical solutions to pharmaceutical business outcomes and patient impact.
Anticipate future technology trends and proactively prepare infrastructure capabilities.
Design solutions that scale globally across diverse regulatory environments
Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term architectural vision.
Collaborative Influence
Build trust and credibility with digital peer organizations through consistent delivery.
Navigate matrix organizations and drive consensus without formal authority.
Partner effectively with Enterprise Architecture while maintaining a solutions delivery focus.
Mentor and develop engineering talent through technical guidance and knowledge sharing.
Communication Excellence
Articulate complex technical architectures clearly for both technical and business audiences.
Create compelling technical documentation, reference architectures, and implementation guides.
Facilitate prod

Work arrangement
Hybrid