Site Quality Head

Job Description Summary

#LI-Onsite

Location: Ivrea, Italy. This role is based in Ivrea, Italy. Novartis is unable to offer relocation support: please only apply if this location is accessible.

Step into a pivotal leadership role where quality, compliance, and patient safety come together. As Site Quality Head, you will shape and safeguard the quality strategy of a complex manufacturing site, ensuring full compliance with global quality standards while enabling business continuity and innovation. You will lead and inspire a multidisciplinary quality organization, act as a trusted partner to site and global leadership, and play a critical role in Health Authority engagement and inspection success. This role offers the opportunity to make a visible impact—driving a strong quality culture, supporting launches, and ensuring that every product released meets the highest standards of safety, quality, and regulatory excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead site Quality strategy ensuring full compliance with cGMP, regulatory requirements, and corporate quality standards.
• Establish and maintain an effective site quality organization, governance model, and decision‑making framework.
• Own site quality systems including deviations, investigations, change control, product quality reviews, and documentation lifecycle.
• Ensure continuous inspection readiness and successfully host Health Authority inspections and follow‑up activities.
• Act as Qualified Person (Deputy), independently overseeing batch certification and release in line with legal requirements.
• Drive strong quality risk management, escalation processes, and timely health authority notifications where required.
• Develop and embed a strong quality culture through training, self‑inspections, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Provide leadership input for quality talent selection, development, succession planning, and launch readiness support.
• Lead, coach, and develop quality leaders and teams to ensure sustainable performance and regulatory excellence.

Essential Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in a scientific discipline such as pharmacy, chemistry, biology, or a related field.
• Minimum five years of experience in pharmaceutical Quality Assurance or Quality Control within a regulated manufacturing environment.
• Strong working knowledge of Good Manufacturing Practice regulations and pharmaceutical quality management systems.
• Proven experience leading quality organizations, including people management, development, and performance oversight.
• Demonstrated experience preparing for, hosting, and responding to Health Authority inspections.
• Fluent English communication skills, both written and spoken, in a global and cross‑functional environment.

Benefits and Rewards

Read our handbook to learn about all the ways we’ll help you thrive personally and professionally: https://www.novartis.com/careers/benefits-rewards

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams' representative of the patients and communities we serve.

Skills Desired

• Analytical Thinking
• Business Acumen
• Business Strategy
• Collaboration
• Communication Skills
• Data Integrity
• Decision Making
• Digital saviness
• Finance Acumen
• Industry standards Knowledge
• Leadership
• Organizational Saviness
• Risk Management
• Smart Risk Taking
• Stakeholder Management
• Storytelling
• Strategic Planning
• Strategic Thinking

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