Director, Principal AI Engineer

Working with Us
Challenging. Meaningful. Life-changing. Those aren’t words that are usually associated with a job. But working at Bristol Myers Squibb is anything but usual. Here, uniquely interesting work happens every day, in every department. From optimizing a production line to the latest breakthroughs in cell therapy, this is work that transforms the lives of patients, and the careers of those who do it. You’ll get the chance to grow and thrive through opportunities uncommon in scale and scope, alongside high-achieving teams. Take your career farther than you thought possible.

Bristol Myers Squibb recognizes the importance of balance and flexibility in our work environment. We offer a wide variety of competitive benefits, services and programs that provide our employees with the resources to pursue their goals, both at work and in their personal lives. Read more: careers.bms.com/working-with-us.

Position Summary

As a Principal AI Engineer within Bristol Myers Squibb’s AI Accelerator program, you will lead a small, cross-functional pod to design and deliver generative AI solutions that transform core business processes across Commercialization, R&D, Manufacturing, and Enabling Functions. You will act as a player-coach—spending roughly 60% of your time hands-on in technical architecture, system and solution design, and building cloud-native GenAI applications, and 40% leading and developing your team. You will own one to two 12-week Accelerator projects at a time, shaping project charters, guiding technical decisions, and delivering AI-powered solutions using modern LLM, ML, and Cloud services and coding agents. Partnering closely with business, product, and technology stakeholders, you will establish reusable patterns, promote responsible AI practices, and help transition successful proofs of concept for scale into impactful, enterprise-wide solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Lead AI Accelerator Projects

·       Own end-to-end delivery of 12-week AI Accelerator projects, from problem framing and solution design through experimentation and handover.

·       Shape use cases, scope, and success metrics in collaboration with business stakeholders, product owners, and the AI Accelerator Hub.

·       Manage trade-offs between experimentation and robustness to keep projects on track and outcome-focused.

·       Ensure smooth transition of successful POCs into Scale phase with functional IT and business teams.

People Management & Team Leadership

·       Lead a small, multi-disciplinary pod of frontend engineers, application/cloud engineers, data scientists, and data engineers.

·       Provide coaching, feedback, and technical mentoring to grow skills and foster a high-performing, inclusive culture.

·       Partner with talent acquisition to hire and onboard new team members; onboard and manage staff-augmentation resources, if needed.

·       Establish lightweight, effective ways of working aligned with agile delivery and rapid experimentation.

Hands-On GenAI Architecture & Delivery

·       Act as technical lead and architect for GenAI solutions, driving technical architecture, system design, and solution design for LLM-based applications and agentic systems.

·       Design and implement solutions involving, but not limited to, context engineering, MCP servers, structured and unstructured data retrieval and manipulation, vector search, and multi-modal inputs (text, tables, images).

·       Build and orchestrate agents and tools to integrate enterprise systems and workflows.

·       Use coding agents effectively (e.g., Claude Code, Codex/GitHub Copilot-style tools, Gemini CLI) to accelerate development while maintaining quality.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Responsible AI 

·       Partner with stakeholders across Commercialization, R&D, Manufacturing, and Enabling Functions.

·       Communicate progress, risks, and outcomes clearly to both tech