Medical Director, Senior Safety Physician
About this opportunity
As a Medical Director, Senior Patient Safety Physician, you are a senior leader within Patient Safety and play a key role bringing deep clinical understanding and judgement in benefit risk assessments for AstraZeneca products. You also have a role in shaping the culture of the department; and will act as a coach and mentor to more junior Patient Safety staff. You will also ensure projects adhere to Good Clinical and Pharmacovigilance Practice and regulatory requirements. We encourage you to closely follow medical developments within assigned areas to incorporate emerging data and trends into the safety strategy
Main Responsibilities :
Providing strategic Patient Safety input to drug development and post-marketing programs
Collaboration with team members to undertake safety surveillance activities and prepare high quality evaluation documents to describe safety findings.
Ensuring expert input to all elements of design and interpretation, including efficient use of tools and methodology (e.g. modelling and simulation).
Providing leadership to support project discussions with governance boards, including interactions with Patient Safety Peer Review Committee.
Lead the safety strategy for regulatory communication and provide oversight of higher-level documents to support submission activities.
Lead medico-scientific contributions to RMPs for assigned products and to Periodic Reports, including PBRERs, DSURs.
More broadly you are expected to participate in advisory discussions to support other Patient Safety teams in the development of their safety strategy and may be asked to represent Patient Safety in cross-functional discussions with internal and external partners.
Minimum Requirements :
BS degree in medicine and experience as a physician or academic clinician
7+ years of proven experience
Extensive experience in Pharmacovigilance, with clear evidence of delivering to a high standard
Detailed understanding of pharmaceutical safety, reporting and surveillance processes and strong experience of Patient Safety, as it relates to clinical trials and marketed products in any relevant field such as pharma, Regulatory Agency or Public Health agency
Experience in designing, supervising and implementing clinical trials and interpreting trial results
Strategic leadership of complex drug projects
Understanding of the medico-legal aspects of pharmacovigilance
Proven leader of cross-functional delivery teams.
Demonstrated ability to influence key business partners within and outside of company
Proficiency with both written and verbal communications
Preferred
PhD in scientific field
5+ years of proven experience
Therapeutic area expertise and commercial understanding
Extensive general medical knowledge
Able to work across TAs and Functions
Research background, including peer reviewed publications
Date Posted
23-Jul-2026
Closing Date
30-Aug-2026
AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Clinical Development role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 184 comparable Director Clinical Development roles across 28 biopharma companies.
Salary context
90 of 184 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 184 comparable roles
+ 11 more countries
Seniority mix
184 of 184 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
78 of 184 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.