Description
About the Role

Norstella's Real World Data (RWD) function delivers longitudinal patient-level datasets - built on claims, EMR, and other clinical data - to pharmaceutical and life sciences clients across all therapeutic areas. As we scale, we are building the next generation of our delivery infrastructure augmented with AI and agentic capabilities to match the flexibility and precision our customers need in RWD data delivery.

The VP, RWD Data Delivery will own the end-to-end delivery execution function, including driving on-time, high quality deliveries and the development of the next generation delivery platform. This is a leadership role for someone who brings deep technical fluency to delivery operations. This role sits at the intersection of data operations, clinical domain knowledge, AI and agentic capabilities, and platform thinking.

The candidates who will thrive in this role think about delivery as a system, not a checklist. They have strong instincts for where manual work is hiding latent risk - and they move toward replacing that work with better tooling and cleaner ownership boundaries, not more process. They build teams that run toward problems rather than escalating them, and they measure their success by what doesn't break rather than how fast they respond when it does.
What You'll Do

Delivery Execution & Ownership

• Own the delivery for RWD data products, ensuring on-time delivery against contracted SLAs and high quality deliveries that meet client expectations and needs
• Lead triage and investigation of delivery issues, making rapid, accurate decisions about root cause across data, pipeline, specification, and vendor dimensions

Quality & Platform Partnership

• Serve as a primary operational partner to the delivery platform engineering team, translating delivery workflow pain points into system requirements and contributing to roadmap prioritization
• Work hands-on with QC dashboards and delivery tooling - evaluating outputs, identifying gaps in automated checks, and proposing enhancements that streamline the delivery process
• Identify patterns across delivery failures and drive systemic fixes - reducing recurrence rather than managing each issue in isolation

Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Coordination

• Lead and develop a team of technical delivery architects, operations analysts and RWD specialists, setting clear ownership, building technical competency, and creating accountability structures that reduce escalation
• Serve as the delivery function's primary interface with Engineering, Clinical Operations, and Client teams - routing decisions correctly and preventing handoff bottlenecks
• Contribute to the design of delivery workflows and escalation paths, with a bias toward streamlining over documenting - fewer steps, cleaner ownership, faster resolution
• All other duties, as assigned

What We're Looking For
Required

• 10+ years of experience in data delivery, data operations, or a closely related function in healthcare, life sciences, or real world data
• Direct experience working with RWD datasets - claims, EMR, or NLP-derived clinical data - in a delivery, QC, or data operations capacity
• Strong technical fluency: ability to read and interpret extract scripts, run counts and validation queries, and investigate data issues independently in a cloud data warehouse environment (Redshift, Snowflake, or equivalent)
• Hands-on experience working with or implementing AI and agentic automation tooling
• Comfort working with DAG-based pipeline infrastructure (Airflow or equivalent) - not necessarily building pipelines, but understanding how they work and how to interpret failures
• Track record of leading small-to-mid-sized operational teams with clear accountability and measurable delivery outcomes
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate technical issues into client-appropriate language when needed

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with delivering data through multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks etc.)
• Hands-on experience working with or implementing QC automation tooling - writing or configuring checks, interpreting dashboards, and driving check coverage improvements.
• Background in a pharma data vendor, CRO, or health data aggregator environment where data delivery operated at scale with multiple concurrent client engagements.
• Experience contributing to the design or rollout of internal delivery platforms or tooling, particularly in a role that bridged operations and engineering.

Please Note - All candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. We do not provide visa sponsorship or transfers. We are not currently accepting candidates who are on an OPT visa.