Associate Principal AI Engineer

Do you have expertise in, and passion for, AI? Would you like to apply your  expertise to impact a company that follows the science and turns ideas into life changing medicines? If so, AstraZeneca might be the one for you!

ABOUT ASTRAZENECA

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven Biopharmaceuticals business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the world’s most serious disease. But we’re more than one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. 

At AstraZeneca we’re dedicated to being a Great Place to Work. Where you are empowered to push the boundaries of science and unleash your entrepreneurial spirit. There’s no better place to make a difference to medicine, patients and society. An inclusive culture that champions diversity and collaboration. Always committed to lifelong learning, growth and development. 

ABOUT OUR ENTERPRISE AI PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY TEAM

A place to do important work. We connect across the whole business to power each function to better influence patient outcomes and improve their lives. Impactful and valuable, this is where you come to raise your profile 

and do good for others. Play an increasingly crucial role in driving disruptive transformation on our journey to becoming a digital and data-led enterprise. Unleash the power of our latest innovations in data, machine learning and technology to turn complex information into life-changing and practical insights. Work in synergy with leading experts in our specialist communities. Here we bring the brightest minds to bear, with access to cutting-edge techniques and the opportunity to be part of novel solutions. It’s up to us to drive the outcomes forward, inventing and building, expanding our knowledge to identify the next opportunity. An inclusive team, we bring together diverse areas – different functions as well as external partners. Pooling from an unrivalled source of knowledge, we share, learn and challenge. It powers us to decode business needs and apply our technical know-how to add greater value. Rise to the challenge of shaping the future of an evolving business in the technology space. 

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Enterprise AI Products and Technology Team are responsible for building and running the platforms, tooling and infrastructure that powers AstraZeneca’s ambition to use AI in every step of the value chain, from discovering new compounds to patient safety systems.   

You will be part of a collaborative team of multidisciplinary engineers and working closely with data science teams, have a chance to create tools, standards and automate commonly used tasks of machine learning product lifecycle. A part of the role is also to increase the capabilities of the platforms team to better suit the data scientist ways of working. Our data science  teams  undertake major AI initiatives such as clinical trial data analysis, knowledge graph analytics, patient safety systems, deep learning led drug discovery, software as a medical device system. 

 As an  Associate Principal AI Engineer you have the software engineering mindset towards automation and agility while being able to question and improve the ways of working of data science teams.  

Key Accountabilities

• Collaborate with Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers  from across the company to understand their challenges and work with them to  build  the  tools/platforms  that  underpins  their  research.   

• Be a part of a high performing agile team, continuously improving  AstraZeneca’s Machine Learning development environments,  platforms and tooling to better suite data science initiatives. 

• Work closely and collaboratively with internal governance and compliance functions such as Cyber Security and Data Privacy to secure our estate without obstructing end-user productivity.   

• Adapt standard machine learning methods to best exploit modern parallel environments (e.g. distributed clusters, multicore SMP, and GPU).  

• Champion a “production first mindset” in the data science projects development lifecycle to seamlessly scale exploratory research to production.   

Candidate Knowledge, Skills and Experience  

• Bsc/MSc/Ph.D degree in Computer Science or related quantitative  or analytical field.  

• Demonstrable experience in software engineering and automation  leveraging DevOps.  

• Prior experience with developing and deploying production grade machine learning products or exceptional ability in other software engineering domains will be considered. 

• 3 years or more of experience building and delivering software using the Python programming language, exceptional ability in other programming languages will be considered. 

• In depth knowledge and experience with at least one container orchestration framework (Airflow, Argo, Kubeflow etc) or willingness to learn. 

• Demonstratable experience deploying the underlying infrastructure and tooling for running Machine Learning or Data Science at Scale  using Infrastructure of Code.

• Experience working in an Agile team.  

• Experience working with internal security standards and  frameworks.

• Creative, collaborative and resilient.  

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.