Description
Job Description — Operations Manager, Contract & Delivery Operations
About Norstella
Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions platform dedicated to improving patient access to life-saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.
Norstella unites five market-leading brands (Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, and The Dedham Group) that all have a shared vision of improving patient access to life-saving therapy. Norstella delivers must-have answers and insights for critical strategic, clinical, and commercial decision-making. We help our clients:
- Accelerate the drug development cycle
- Make data driven commercial and financial decisions
- Match and recruit patients for clinical trials
- Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market
- Identify and address barriers to patient access
- Leverage the latest AI to turn data into insights for faster and better decision making
Norstella serves almost every pharmaceutical and biotech company in the world, along with regulators like the FDA, and payers. By providing critical proprietary data supporting AI-driven workflows, Norstella helps clients make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Norstella's investments in AI are transforming how data is consumed and decisions are made, disrupting inefficient legacy workflows and helping the industry become more efficient, innovative, and responsive to patient needs.
About The Position:
Department: Data Operations – RWD Delivery & Contract Operations | Manager: Senior Director, RWD Operations | Location: United States (Remote) or India – US ET Hours (Remote) | Level: Mid-Level (Individual Contributor).
Every dataset Norstella delivers helps life-sciences teams make faster, better-informed decisions about patient care. The RWD Contract & Delivery Operations Manager is the person who makes sure those datasets arrive on time, accurately, and without interruption — from the moment a contract is signed through years of ongoing delivery. If you thrive on turning complex, cross-functional processes into repeatable, reliable systems, this role will let you do that at scale.
You will own the full lifecycle of data deliverables — contract setup, platform configuration, delivery execution, and contract close-out. Sitting at the intersection of client engagement, data engineering, quality assurance, and delivery infrastructure, you'll be the operational backbone that keeps dozens of concurrent workstreams moving on schedule. This is not a "monitor dashboards" role; you'll actively drive process, solve problems across teams, and build the operational rigor that lets the company scale.
The ideal candidate for this position will have a strong interest in healthcare and technology, excellent organizational skills, and experience enhancing processes. The candidate must also possess excellent written and verbal communication skills so as to work effectively in cross-functional internal teams across the Real World Data team and beyond. An ability to work in a fast-paced environment, sometimes under pressure, remaining flexible, proactive, resourceful and efficient, with a high level of professionalism is crucial to this role.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own end-to-end contract-to-delivery setup by creating and maintaining Jira epics/deliverable records and governing deliverable metadata (dates, specs, cadence, security/encryption, delivery location, and client technical contacts) across first deliveries, ongoing deliveries, and redeliveries.
- Drive post-sale delivery operations and contract governance by progressing deliverables through lifecycle stages, enforcing SharePoint folder standards, proactively managing renewals/terminations, and ensuring deliveries do not occur past contract end dates.
- Configure deliverables and feeds in the delivery platform: link scripts, set quality checks, and build delivery schedules.
- Serve as configuration gatekeeper to ensure project tracking and code changes are reflected in the delivery platform.
- Monitor active-state deliverables daily to keep the delivery tracking board accurate, complete, and current.
- Execute clean handoff from active state to steady state, including delivery team assignments and ownership transitions.
- Serve as the operational liaison across Engagement, Technical Operations, QA, and Business Operations during active-state delivery — maintaining project records, aligning delivery/provisioning needs, and ensuring contract and tracking-system accuracy.
- Own team-facing delivery communications by managing inbound questions and operational notifications, escalating risks as needed to support on-time, compliant deliverables.
- All other duties, as assigned.
Required Qualifications
- 3–5 years in operations management, delivery operations, or project management — ideally in data, analytics, life sciences, or healthcare.
- Jira power-user skills: epics, subtasks, custom workflows, filters, board management, and dashboard reporting. You treat the tracking system as a delivery tool, not an afterthought.
- Proven cross-functional execution: you've run complex, multi-step workflows across teams that don't report to you, and you've kept everything on track.
- Familiarity with data delivery pipelines: you understand ETL concepts, scheduling, secure file transfer, and what can go wrong between "data is ready" and "client has it."
- Exceptional attention to detail across dozens of concurrent deliverables — you catch the missed date or wrong encryption flag before it becomes an incident.
- Clear, direct communication — written and verbal — with the confidence to drive accountability without positional authority.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with real-world data (RWD) delivery in life sciences or healthcare.
- Hands-on exposure to Azure DevOps, Redshift, or Airflow (or similar orchestration/infrastructure tools).
- Familiarity with automated data quality frameworks, data dictionaries, and/or codebooks.
- Experience documenting processes in Confluence or similar collaboration platforms.
How You'll Know You're Succeeding
These are the outcomes we'll measure together in your first year:
- The tracking system is trustworthy — anyone can open Jira and see the true state of every contract, deliverable, and delivery record without asking you.
- Delivery system stays up to date — platform configurations are accurate, validated, and decommissioned on schedule.
- Handoffs are seamless — no information gaps between teams; new team members can pick up context from your documentation alone.
- Risks surface early — operational issues are identified and mitigated before they impact clients or data quality.
- Delivery SLAs are consistently met — work advances on schedule with minimal escalations.
Our guiding principles for success at Norstella:
- Bold, Passionate, Mission-First — We have a lofty mission to Smooth Access to Life Saving Therapies, and we will get there by being bold and passionate about the mission and our clients. Our clients and the mission in what we are trying to accomplish must be in the forefront of our minds in everything we do.
- Integrity, Truth, Reality — We make promises that we can keep, and goals that push us to new heights. Our integrity offers us the opportunity to learn and improve by being honest about what works and what doesn't. By being true to the data and producing realistic metrics, we are able to create plans and resources to achieve our goals.
- Kindness, Empathy, Grace — We will empathize with everyone's situation, provide positive and constructive feedback with kindness, and accept opportunities for improvement with grace and gratitude. We use this principle across the organization to collaborate and build lines of open communication.
- Resilience, Mettle, Perseverance — We will persevere — even in difficult and challenging situations. Our ability to recover from missteps and failures in a positive way will help us to be successful in our mission.
- Humility, Gratitude, Learning — We will be true learners by showing humility and gratitude in our work. We recognize that the smartest person in the room is the one who is always listening, learning, and willing to shift their thinking.
Norstella is an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, color, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age. Our ethos is to respect and value people's differences, to help everyone achieve more at work as well as in their personal lives so that they feel proud of the part they play in our success. We believe that all decisions about people at work should be based on the individual's abilities, skills, performance and behavior and our business requirements. Norstella operates a zero-tolerance policy to any form of discrimination, abuse or harassment.
All legitimate roles with Norstella will be posted on Norstella's job board which is located at norstella.com/careers. If a role is not posted on this job board, a candidate should assume the role is not a legitimate role with Norstella. Norstella is not responsible for an application that may be submitted by or through a third-party and candidates should proceed with extreme caution if a third-party approaches them about an open role with Norstella. Norstella will never ask for anything of value or any type of payment during or as part of any recruitment, interview, or pre-hire onboarding process. If you are aware of or have reason to believe a job posting purportedly for a role with Norstella is fraudulent or otherwise not authorized by Norstella, please contact the Company using the following email address: [email protected]
