Role Summary

Lead data governance for AstraZeneca’s China R&D office, aligning local policies and controls to enterprise standards. Set policy, assess and mitigate data/AI risk, advise projects, and ensure compliance with China and international regulations, including cross-border data transfer constraints (e.g., Personal Information Protection Law, Cybersecurity Law, and US Department of Justice guidance on bulk transfers). Report functionally to China R&D and dotted line to the Enterprise Data Enablement team and partner with local Chinese teams, Global Compliance, Privacy, Cybersecurity, Quality, Internal Audit and IT Data & Analytics.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategy and Policy: Localize and implement enterprise Data & AI Policy and standards across China R&D; drive interoperability, reuse, and analytics readiness.
• Regulatory and Risk: Interpret and operationalize China and global requirements (Personal Information Protection Law, Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law, Cybersecurity Administration of China). Maintain a data/AI risk register, lead mitigations with Privacy, Legal, and Cyber.
• Cross-Border and Localization: Govern residency, lawful transfer (Standard Contractual Clauses of China, Cyberspace Administration of China filings, Data Transfer Impact Assessment/Privacy Impact Assessment), de-identification/pseudonymization, and secure access patterns.
• R&D Enablement: Establish stewardship, metadata, lineage, and data quality rules for clinical, real-world, omics, and imaging data; support FAIR practices.
• AI Governance: Ensure responsible AI in R&D (model documentation, provenance, validation, monitoring, human oversight).
• Assurance: Prepare for audits/inspections; design and test privacy/security controls and GxP-aligned data processes.
• Global Collaboration and Stakeholder engagement: Represent China in EDE forums; feed China requirements into enterprise technology and standards.

Typical Accountabilities

• Operate the China R&D data governance model, RACI, and councils.
• Approve classifications, sharing agreements, and data transfer impact assessments.
• Set KPIs for quality, reuse, access time, and CBDT approvals, lead incident response.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree, advanced degree preferred.
• Significant data governance leadership in regulated, multinational biopharma R&D.
• Deep knowledge of China regulations (PIPL, CSL, DSL, CAC) and global constraints (including US DOJ positions on bulk transfers).
• Experience with catalogs/lineage, MDM/RDM, data quality, consent/privacy tech, secure research environments, and role-based access control.
• Strong stakeholder communication; fluent in English and Mandarin.

Desirable Experience

• Pharmaceutical or biotechnology R&D background, including clinical data standards (e.g., Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium), omics/imaging data ecosystems, and real-world data partnerships in China.
• An understanding of how AI can be used locally to automate and improve data governance processes.
• Knowledge of enterprise platforms and architectures (e.g., data mesh/data Lakehouse, SAP/MDM, Veeva, Reltio), and privacy-enhancing technologies (tokenization, differential privacy, synthetic data).
• Experience with global shared services and federated data operating models.
• Project and change management credentials; Lean/Six Sigma exposure; Power BI/Excel analytics capability.