Sentinel Surface Lead

Role Summary

Sentinel is one of the eight Platforms forming the core of Pfizer’s artificial intelligence (AI) transformation. Sentinel provides a single front door to deploying and maintaining infrastructure and services. Its scope moves beyond the traditional hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and into the non-hyperscaler space, where the same front door can stand up a Supabase instance, a Grok agent, or whichever new capability arrives next. Sentinel Surface is that front door made visible: the user interface through which infrastructure engineers deploy, maintain and destroy infrastructure and services via Sentinel. We are seeking a Sentinel Surface Lead, responsible for the delivery of the interface through which Pfizer’s infrastructure engineers meet Sentinel. The Surface has to make managing infrastructure and services simple without patronising the people using it: our users are practitioners who know their domain, and an interface that conceals too much or explains too much will lose them as surely as one that exposes everything. Holding that line is the central judgment of this role. You will own the delivery, the architecture and the design of Sentinel Surface, and you will be accountable for the experience it delivers. Sentinel Surface is the presentation layer for Sentinel. It is layered on top of Sentinel’s components — the Service Catalog, the Asset Inventory, and those that follow as the platform grows — and its job is to turn what they hold into a compelling and highly functional interface for the engineers who use it. The components remain authoritative for their own domain; the Surface is where they become usable. You will work closely with the teams who own them: their interfaces are your dependencies, and what the Surface needs of them is your case to make. The role reports to the Senior Director, Engineering Lead, in an organization that runs up through the Vice President, Initiative Lead and the Chief Technologist to the Chief Information Officer (CIO). You will carry no colleague line management, and will lead a small, focused team of contract engineering resources who build the Surface. This role is global in scope: the Surface serves every infrastructure engineer Sentinel reaches, across every business line Sentinel serves. You will work with those engineers directly to understand their requirements and to take their feedback on board, and alongside the Customer Experience teams outside Sentinel whose craft and standards the Surface draws on. You are the face of Sentinel: for most of its users the Surface is the platform, and their judgment of one is their judgment of the other.

Role Responsibilities Surface Ownership

You own the interface through which Pfizer’s infrastructure engineers use Sentinel:

• Product and Experience Ownership: You are accountable for Sentinel Surface end to end — what it does, how it behaves and how it feels to use — from the definition of the experience through to what ships. You hold the line between simple and patronising: the Surface makes the common path effortless without concealing what a competent engineer needs to see, and without walking an expert through a workflow designed for a novice.
• Architecture Ownership: You own the Surface’s architecture and the decisions that set it: how it is composed, how it holds and refreshes state, how it behaves when a component it depends on is slow, stale or unavailable, and how it stays maintainable as the platform’s surface area grows. Security is an architectural property here rather than a later review: the Surface does not itself hold authorisation for the actions it offers — that sits with the systems it calls — so it has to understand the authorisation models in use and reflect them faithfully in what it presents and permits, and it audits the actions taken within it. The contract engineers build it; you are accountable for it being right.
• Design Ownership: You own the design direction — the information architecture, the interaction patterns and the design system the Surface is built from — and you set the standard the work is held to, judging it rigorously whether the craft comes from your own hands or from Customer Experience partners.
• Technical Credibility: You lead the delivery, architecture and design of the Surface; the contract team builds it. You may well be hands-on where it is the fastest way to settle a question — prototyping an interaction, spiking an approach, reviewing or writing code — but the role is not measured by what you build yourself, and that work never displaces the leadership the team and the stakeholders need from you. You bring a working command of front end architecture, application programming interface (API) design, performance and accessibility: enough to hold a real design discussion with the engineers who write the code, to question an estimate, probe a design decision, and tell a considered answer from a plausible one.

Customer Understanding

You go to the engineers who use Sentinel rather than waiting for them to come to you:

• Direct Customer Engagement: You work directly with infrastructure engineers across Pfizer to understand how they work, what they are trying to achieve and where Sentinel could do more to deliver successful outcomes for them, whether that means new capability or removing something that slows them down. You run discovery yourself rather than receiving it second hand, and you know the difference between what a user asks for and what they need.
• Feedback Loops: You establish the routes by which feedback reaches the Surface team and the discipline that closes them: instrumented usage, usability testing, structured research, and the unstructured complaint that turns out to matter. You are explicit with users about what you have changed as a result, and about what you have not and why.
• Measurable Design Decisions: You make design decisions from evidence rather than assertion, and you define how each significant one will be measured before it ships — whether engineers complete what they came to do, where they get stuck or fall back to another route, and what they tell you about it. You take considered risks where the evidence runs out, and you say plainly which of the two you are acting on. DELIVERY You lead the build of Sentinel Surface and the delivery of the roadmap behind it:
• Roadmap Ownership: You own the delivery roadmap for Sentinel Surface, sequencing capability against the demand the platform and its users place on it, anticipating the components and service types the Surface will have to present as Sentinel grows, and keeping the plan honest as priorities change.
• Contract Team Leadership: You lead a small, focused team of contract engineering resources who build the Surface, setting technical direction, quality expectations and priorities, working alongside them through architecture and design, and ensuring the effort is appropriately resourced to meet the deliverables and timescale commitments.
• Quality and Release Discipline: You define what done means for the Surface — functional, performance, accessibility and resilience — and hold the team to it. You own the release approach and the confidence it gives you to ship often without breaking the people who depend on it.
• Dependency and Risk Management: You surface dependencies early — on the Service Catalog, on the Asset Inventory, on the platforms and teams whose interfaces the Surface consumes — and drive blockers to resolution with those teams, keeping affected stakeholders informed throughout. You exercise judgment in complex decisions and act independently on what you can see coming rather than waiting for a user to find it.

Platform Integration

The Surface consumes Sentinel’s components rather than reproducing them, and you own how it uses them:

• Service Catalog Consumption: You work with the Service Catalog as the definitive list of infras