Technical Lead

This is the opportunity to transform global healthcare through new and innovative digital solutions as our new Technical Lead.

Your new role

As a Technical Lead for NN Planner, you will shape, develop, and drive Novo Nordisk workforce planning application.

We are looking for someone who enjoys defining technical direction and then rolling up their sleeves to implement it with the team. Someone who can discuss long-term architectural strategy in the morning and spend the afternoon improving a Python service, designing a PostgreSQL migration strategy, or reviewing a complex pull request.

What you'll be doing

• Own the technical direction of a production Python Product — balancing ongoing feature delivery, quality improvements, and a deliberate migration from legacy patterns to modern architecture.
• Define and own the long-term architecture vision for NN Planner and own our cloud infrastructure — manage and evolve our AWS setup (ECS Fargate, ECR, ALB, S3, IAM, SSM) using Terraform, with a strong focus on reproducibility and multi-environment consistency.
• Lead architectural evolution while ensuring continuous feature delivery and enforce architectural boundaries — apply Domain-Driven Design principles to identify bounded contexts, implement the repository pattern, and prevent domain leakage.
• Lead by doing — write and review production code daily, set the standard for how we build, test, and deploy software.
• Drive our data layer — own schema design and evolution, query performance, and migration strategy on PostgreSQL using SQLAlchemy 2.0 and Alembic, including zero-downtime migration patterns on live databases.
• Modernise incrementally — apply patterns like strangler fig, multiple rest APIs, and bridge layers to migrate legacy systems while they continue serving production traffic.
• Build with quality as a constraint, not an afterthought — maintain a strong testing culture with pytest, covering unit, integration, and BDD-style tests that serve as compliance artifacts in our QMS.
• Mentor and grow engineers — set the technical culture, run meaningful code reviews, and help the team level up continuously.

We build full end-to-end digital solutions on AWS, using Python and React, with CI/CD pipelines for continuous delivery. As we are pioneering the digital transformation of Novo Nordisk, we expect you to challenge and encourage the organization as well as take part in establishing a strong internal community to share knowledge and takeaways.

Your new department

Planning Solutions is part of the Enterprise Platforms organization at Novo Nordisk — the team responsible for the digital platforms that power Novo Nordisk's operations at scale. We sit at the heart of the company's most business-critical applications, building and maintaining the solutions that thousands of colleagues rely on every day. As a member of Planning Solutions, you will join a team dedicated to driving the development, adoption, and scaling of our digital planning solutions. We work closely with the business to ensure our platforms not only meet today's needs but are built to grow with the organization. This means working on a product that is already in the hands of thousands of users and scaling fast.

We offer a modern working environment, a high bar for technical quality, and the satisfaction of seeing your work make a real impact across Novo Nordisk's global operations. Discover the cutting-edge technologies behind Novo Nordisk's life-changing innovations at TechLife at Novo Nordisk. From AI to quantum computing, our digital experts push boundaries and make a tangible impact on lives across the globe. You don't want to miss it.

Your skills & qualifications

To be successful in this role, you should come with a strong understanding and hands-on experience within broad software development i.e. within system architecture, coding for scale, communicating possibilities about what can be built and maintained, as well as love to experiment and build MVPs.

Architecture at Novo Nordisk is not only about designing systems and writing code. It is also about making technical direction explicit, understandable, and traceable. You bring structure, planning, and excellent communication to your work, and you are comfortable turning architectural thinking into clear documentation, diagrams, decision records, and implementation plans. You see documentation as part of engineering — not as an afterthought.

In addition:

• You have 10+ years' professional experience and will likely come from a similar position
• You should hold a bachelor's or master’s degree in software engineering, Computer Science or other relevant field
• Significant experience in architecture, principal engineering, or staff engineering roles.
• You are passionate about development and could have a presence on GitHub or other OSS platforms with publicly available code that will help us assess your skills
• Python — Extensive demonstrated experience building and maintaining production Python systems. Deep fluency with modern Python: type hints, dataclasses, protocols, async/await, context managers, decorators, and modern packaging. You are comfortable navigating, understanding, and improving large legacy codebases while simultaneously building ode to high standards.
• SQLAlchemy 2.0 — Hands-on experience with the modern ORM API relationship loading strategies). Ideally has migrated code from SQLAlchemy 1.x to 2.0 patterns.
• PostgreSQL — Proficient in schema design, query optimization (EXPLAIN ANALYZE), indexing strategies, transaction isolation, and managing schema changes on live databases.
• RDBMS fundamentals — Solid understanding of normalization, referential integrity, foreign key constraints, composite keys, and knowing when to denormalize.
• Database migrations (Alembic) — Experience managing schema migrations in production, including zero-downtime patterns (e.g., multi-step add-column-then-backfill-then-constrain).
• FastAPI (or equivalent ASGI framework) — Experience with dependency injection, Pydantic validation, middleware, and building production REST APIs.
• Refactoring running production applications — Demonstrated experience incrementally migrating a legacy application to a modern architecture while it continues to serve production traffic. Understands patterns like strangler fig, parallel running, and bridge layers.
• AWS — Working knowledge of ECS Fargate, ECR, ALB, S3, IAM roles, and SSM Parameter Store.
• Terraform — Experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, including state management, multi-environment configuration, and plan/apply workflows.
• Docker — Comfortable with multi-stage builds, layer caching, production image optimization, and debugging containerized applications.
• Testing (pytest) — Strong testing discipline covering unit and integration tests. Experience with fixture design, test isolation strategies, and test markers/parametrization.
• BDD / behavior-driven testing — Experience writing tests that map directly to user requirements and serve as evidence of fitness for intended use. Familiarity with Given/When/Then patterns. Important for our regulated industry context where tests serve as QMS compliance artifacts.
• UV (Astral) package manager — Familiarity with uv for Python dependency management, workspaces, and lock files.
• Domain-Driven Design — Experience identifying bounded contexts, implementing the repository pattern, and enforcing architectural boundaries between domains.

Working at Novo Nordisk

At Novo Nordisk, we don’t just offer a job; we offer a career that makes a difference. For over 100 years, we have been driven by a shared purpose to create extraordinary results for patients. When you join us, you become part of a culture characterized by mutual respect, diverse thinking, and a determination to find better ways forward.

What we offer

At Novo Nordisk, you’ll join a global healthcare company with a unique culture and strong results. We offer continuous learning, career development, and benefits tailored to your life and career stage.

Salary: For this role, the Annual Base Salary ranges from 742,600.00 to 1,091,600.00 DKK, corresponding to the level of the position.

The placement within the salary range will be assessed during the recruitment process based on the candidate’s skills, competencies, knowledge, and relevant experience.

Incentives and Benefits: The salary package may include short-term and/or long-term incentives as well as other employee benefits based on position level,  location, functional area and relevant market benchmarks.

Learn more about our Reward Philosophy here.

Contact and Deadline

Apply by 22 June 2026 at the latest

We commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants.

At Novo Nordisk, we're not chasing quick fixes – we're creating lasting change for long-term health. For over 100 years, we've been driven by a single purpose: to defeat serious chronic diseases and help millions of people live healthier lives. This dedication fuels our constant curiosity and inspires us to push the boundaries of what's possible in healthcare. We embrace diverse perspectives, seek out bold ideas, and build partnerships rooted in shared purpose. Together, we're making healthcare more accessible, treating and preventing diseases, and pioneering solutions that create change spanning generations. When you join us, you become part of something bigger – a legacy of impact that reaches far beyond today.