Head of Delivery

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Job Description

About the role: 
Own end-to-end delivery for AI & Data across PDT & GSQ DD&T, so that what the function promises, it reliably delivers — on time, at quality, and at scale. This is a dual mandate: lead the entire Data delivery organization as its functional head, and own delivery orchestration across all of AI & Data, turning a workforce of internal teams, external partners, and agentic capacity — several hundred strong and spread across multiple locations — into a single, well-oiled engine serving PDT and GSQ. You are not required to be a data specialist; you are the person who makes a large, complex, multi-vendor organization perform as one, setting the standard, holding the line on commitments, and building a delivery reputation the business trusts. You operate agentically by default, where agents and AI-amplified ways of working are how execution time is collapsed and unit cost driven down, within Good Practice (GxP) compliance and an AI system development life cycle compliant approach. This role sets the delivery bar for the function and contributes directly to Takeda's mission.

How you will contribute: 

• Own the full delivery lifecycle across AI & Data for PDT and GSQ, from commitment to production, as the single point of accountability that what is promised is delivered on time, at quality, and at the agreed cost.
• Run planning, prioritization, dependency management, risk, and escalation as one connected system rather than a collection of disconnected projects, so that interdependent workstreams move together and no team is blocked by an unmanaged hand-off.
• Lead all Data delivery work as functional head — internal teams and external partners across multiple locations — in tight alignment with the Head of Data Strategy & Standards, who owns the architecture and standards that delivery executes to and holds the line on.
• Treat every commitment as a promise, making scope, trade-offs, and timelines explicit and ensuring a deferred item is a governed decision with an owner, never a silent drop.
• Establish and enforce a shared definition of done across all teams and partners so that quality is built in and evidenced continuously through evaluation and audit trails, not inspected in at the end.
• Make agentic ways of working the default operating model, orchestrating a hybrid workforce of people and agents and holding the organization to the throughput and unit-cost standard that AI amplification makes possible.
• Deliver governed agentic AI within a regulated environment, ensuring that agent-assisted delivery meets GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, and ALCOA+ expectations with validation, traceability, and auditability built into the delivery lifecycle.
• Lead the transformation and change management required to move a large, distributed organization to new ways of working, driving genuine adoption and redefining roles as agents absorb routine execution and people move up the value chain.
• Drive synergy across teams through shared assets, reusable components, and common standards, eliminating duplicated effort and turning separate mandates into one engine in close collaboration with the AI & Data leadership team across quality, portfolio, and strategy.
• Run continuous improvement as a discipline through structured retrospectives and operating-model fixes, removing one recurring failure every cycle and raising the bar the organization measures itself against.
• Build and hold a high-standards, high-trust team culture in which people are stretched, supported, and held accountable without drama, establishing a delivery reputation across PDT, GSQ, and leadership that AI & Data is reliable and that it delivers.

Skills and qualifications: 

• You will bring 15+ years of experience in technology or data delivery, including significant time leading large-scale, multi-vendor, multi-location delivery organizations of several hundred people.
• Proven track record of turning many parallel workstreams into one predictable, reliable delivery engine, with full accountability for throughput, quality, cost, and on-time delivery.
• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree (MSc or MBA) or equivalent senior leadership experience preferred.
• Deep program and portfolio delivery leadership, expert in delivery governance, dependency management, and recovering delivery decisively when it slips.
• Genuinely fluent in AI-native and agentic ways of working — you set the expectation, model it personally, and drive adoption; you do not need to be a builder, but you must be AI-fluent and able to orchestrate a hybrid human-and-agent workforce.
• Strong change and transformation leadership, with demonstrated ability to drive adoption of new operating models across a large, distributed workforce.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and the ability to influence without authority across organizational boundaries, credible with senior business and functional leaders.
• Vendor and commercial management experience, holding external delivery partners to a single quality and cost standard.
• Experience delivering in regulated environments including GxP, 21 CFR Part 11 and ALCOA+; pharma, plasma or life sciences preferred, or the demonstrated ability to operate to that level of rigor.
• Data domain expertise is not required; delivery leadership, accountability, and the ability to make a large organization perform as one are.

As the senior leader of a large delivery function, you operate with considerable autonomy and serve as the primary point of accountability for delivery across AI & Data, internally and with external partners. You set operating standards and ways of working, conduct executive briefings and delivery reviews, and interface with leaders of equivalent status across PDT, GSQ, and DD&T. You provide strategic direction and oversight to delivery managers across multiple teams and locations, ensuring that commitments, schedules, quality standards, and budgets are realistically established and reliably met. Your focus is strategic and systemic, building the engine and raising the bar, and you act as a trusted advisor to executive leadership and a spokesperson for delivery on major matters.

Locations

IND - Bengaluru

Worker Type

Employee

Worker Sub-Type

Regular

Time Type

Full time