Alliance Management Associate Director, 4-month contract
Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Type of Role: Contract position, Inside IR35
Location: Hybrid, 3 days on site in Paddington, London

Looking for opportunities with purpose, impact and possibilities? Our client, Vertex, is a global biotechnology company that invests in scientific innovation. As they grow their pipeline at pace, they are strengthening their reputation for creating transformative medicines for people with serious diseases.

General Summary
This role provides critical support across Vertex’s International Commercial Distributor Region alliance management activities, with priority focus on coordinating and enabling delivery across several key alliance projects.
The position will work in close partnership with the Director, Alliance Management, while formally reporting to Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships & Expansion, ensuring both strong day-to-day connection to alliance priorities and effective alignment across the broader team.
The successful candidate will be comfortable operating in a matrixed environment, managing multiple priorities, and helping drive high-quality execution.
This is initially a contract to September 2026, and while nothing is guaranteed, there may be further opportunity depending on business needs.

Key responsibilities:

• Help implement governance surrounding existing distributor training and onboarding assignments, working closely with the VertexU steering committee and DTE to sure effective assignments of material and compliance with Vertex ways of working.
• Design new training strategy for distribution partners to ensure sound knowledge base in line with change in partnership scope, changes in operations and to generally maintain a refresher material base and consistent source of guidance.
• Build out from a MVP Power BI dashboard and supporting KPI framework, to consolidate distributor data and provide improved visibility of distributor performance, alliance health, and operational insights, enabling faster and more informed decision-making across distributor markets.
• Helping establish excellence and continuous improvement in commercial planning, and timely execution with a fast-paced environment.
• Consolidating knowledge of international markets (including Latin America, Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe), cultural and operational norms to leverage partnership value, manage risk and transition partnership scope in line with commercial strategy and sustainability.
• Develops communication plans that will ensure critical information is shared and presented in a timely manner to internal cross-functional groups, leadership committees and to external audiences.
• Helps realize the goal of implementing partner-agnostic best practice norms, and helping roll-out newly created resources for holistic partnership oversight across the distributor portfolio.

• Bachelor’s degree in relevant hard science or business discipline.
• Experience in the biotech/pharmaceutical industry, as an instrumental contributor to a range of complex multi-dimensional workstreams within a direct alliance management capacity.
• Proven experience in commercial operations; preferably experience in managing distributor partnerships and executive go-to-market planning and/or a strong background in consultancy.
• An entrepreneurial mindset with a knowledge of business practices and cultural differences across international markets.
• Adept at working with multiple cultures, with an understanding of key stakeholders relevant to pharmaceutical supply in either Latin America, Middle East and Africa or Asia Pacific.
• Proficient in PowerPoint and at least one bespoke project management tool, with an ability to display complex visual representations of inter-dependent workstreams.
• Strong team player and an ability to navigate and be successful in a fast-paced, highly matrixed work environment and to manage ambiguity and complexity.
• A good analyst with the ability to extract and synthesize detailed/technical information into big-picture strategy.