Sr Director, Systems Development/Automation Engineering

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At Exact Sciences, we’re helping change how the world prevents, detects and guides treatment for cancer. We give patients and clinicians the clarity needed to make confident decisions when they matter most. Join our team to find a purpose-driven career, an inclusive culture, and robust benefits to support your life while you’re working to help others.

Position Overview

The Senior Director, Systems Development serves as a thought leader and subject matter expert, and collaborates with cross-functional leaders and stakeholders to define, invent, design, and develop custom automation that supports improved performance and throughput of complex in vitro diagnostic tests. The Sr. Director leads the creation of the system architecture that defines the breakdown of the automation needs into designs of sub-systems, modules, components, and interfaces needed to automate the diagnostic test processes.  Managing and coordinating teams of engineers, the Sr. Director ensures that that user, customer, and business stakeholder needs are correctly captured and translated into design specifications, implemented, and verified and validated under quality system design control.  This role applies expert technical, project and personnel management skills to ensure project success and to develop engineering staff to assume roles with increasing responsibility. This position reports to the R&D Systems Development function.

Essential Duties

Include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Work on significant and unique issues where analysis, situations, or data requires an evaluation of intangible variables and may impact future concepts, products, or technologies.
• Work on multiple projects that are extremely complex in scope, often across multiple groups and sites.
• Guide creation and evaluation of highly complex medical device automation design concepts while encouraging staff to invent robust solutions.
• Lead design of highly complex system architectures that incorporate control systems, hardware, and software to automate medical devices.
• Guide engineers in decomposition of system architectures into successive layers of items/modules with interactions between modules and layers defined by concise interfaces.
• Lead engineers in implementation of items/modules by engineering disciplines including automation, controls, electrical, mechanical, and software.
• Select common core technologies to support development across different automation programs.
• Lead work on multiple projects that are extremely complex in scope, often across multiple groups and sites.
• Determine the scope, technical difficulty, plans, time, resources, and risks associated with new automation programs.
• Determine and implement best practices for invention and development of new automation solutions.
• Determine standards and best practices for documentation of complex automation projects.
• Interpret results of tests and experiments, conduct creative analyses, recommend alternative approaches to product/process development and improvement, and execute high-level decision-making.
• Create and manage high-level schedules and resource plans for automation projects and programs.
• Deliver effective written and oral presentations of designs, analyses, findings, and recommendations to project teams, senior management, and leadership teams.
• Provide deep technical expertise on design control process and documentation and create structure for highly complex automation projects.
• Lead identification of areas for process and product improvements.
• Lead teams in creation of unit, module and system design specifications from stakeholder needs.
• Troubleshoot multi-disciplinary system issues and failures, determine root cause of failures, and recommend corrective actions.
• Exercise independent judgment in developing methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for obtaining solutions.
• Communicate and record issues, defects, bugs and contribute to their resolution.
• Contribute ideas for new products and product improvements.
• Create new unit, module and system level design control documentation as required.
• Design templates and set examples and best practices for design documentation.
• Influence company policies for design documentation to least burdensome principles.
• Report status of assigned projects and tasks for self and teams.
• Lead and guide risk and failure mode and effect assessments of complex, multi-component systems, from unit to module through system level.
• Supervise staff; including, but not limited to, organize and prioritize work, write/conduct performance reviews, train/develop, and manage work performance.
• Communicate goals clearly to employees to en