About the Role
Thermo Fisher's PPD clinical research group (CRG) is leveraging digital innovation, data science, and AI to accelerate the delivery of life-changing therapies to patients. This role is responsible for building, operating, and scaling CRG Digital’s end-to-end AI engineering and platform capability, ensuring AI-enabled solutions are production-ready, scalable, and integrated into business operations.
Responsibilities
- Lead product-aligned engineering teams to deliver AI-enabled applications and services at scale, with a strong emphasis on AI-native development practices.
- Redefine engineering productivity by driving adoption of AI-assisted and agent-based development, including AI coding assistants, agent-enabled code generation, testing, refactoring, and automated documentation and code review workflows.
- Establish a target operating model where individual engineers are significantly amplified by AI tooling, enabling 1 engineer to deliver the output of multiple traditional engineers through effective human–AI collaboration.
- Shift engineering focus from manual coding to solution architecture and system design, validation, testing, and quality assurance of AI-generated code and integration of AI services into scalable systems.
- Own the reliable, high-quality delivery of AI/ML and GenAI solutions, AI-enabled product features and APIs, and integrated data and feature pipelines.
- Establish a high-throughput engineering model driven by rapid iteration cycles, automation-first development workflows, and reuse of components and services.
- Partner with Solution Architecture to translate use cases into scalable, production-ready solutions, ensuring alignment between design intent and engineering execution.
- Ensure seamless integration of AI capabilities into digital products and workflows, with a focus on speed, adaptability, and maintainability.
- Build and scale a modern AI-native execution layer that operationalizes AI-driven decisions into real-world actions.
- Integrate and evolve capabilities including APIs and system integrations, workflow orchestration frameworks, and intelligent automation (including RPA as a supporting capability).
- Ensure automation is AI-driven, not task-driven, reusable, and standardized, tightly integrated with platform and AI services.
- Enable execution patterns that support human-in-the-loop, semi-autonomous, and agentic workflows.
- Establish and scale end-to-end AI lifecycle management, including model development, validation, deployment, monitoring, versioning, performance tracking, and drift detection.
- Ensure platform and engineering systems meet requirements for reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, observability, and monitoring.
- Embed governance-by-design in partnership with AI Risk & Compliance, including auditability, traceability, and secure and compliant development practices.
- Define and manage the ecosystem of engineering and platform partners.
- Drive effective onshore/offshore and partner delivery models aligned to group needs.
- Ensure partners contribute to reusable assets and platform capabilities and speed and quality of delivery.
- Lead internal capability building in AI engineering, platform engineering, and emerging AI and agentic technologies.
- Build and lead a high-performing organization across AI engineering, platform engineering, and automation and orchestration capabilities.
- Define roles, skill models, and career paths aligned to future-state AI capabilities.
- Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, reuse, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred (computer science, engineering, AI/ML, or related field).
- 12 years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or technology leadership roles, with a proven track record of building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations.
- Demonstrated experience defining and implementing scalable, reusable platform architectures and shared capability layers in complex enterprise environments.
- Experience delivering AI/ML and/or GenAI-enabled systems in production, including understanding of model lifecycle, integration patterns, and operational considerations.
- Proven ability to evolve engineering organizations toward modern, automation-first and AI-assisted development practices, driving meaningful improvements in speed, quality, and efficiency.
- Demonstrated success driving step-change improvements in engineering productivity and delivery models, including adoption of AI-assisted or agent-based development approaches.
- Experience operating in complex, matrixed organizations with cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Data, AI, and Business teams.
- Experience in regulated environments (e.g., healthcare, life sciences) preferred, with an understanding of compliance, security, and quality considerations in engineering systems.
- Able to communicate, receive, and understand information and ideas with diverse groups of people in a comprehensible and reasonable manner.
- Able to work upright and stationary for typical working hours.
- Ability to use and learn standard office equipment and technology with proficiency.
- Able to perform successfully under pressure while prioritizing and handling multiple projects or activities.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.
- Must be able to pass a comprehensive background check, which includes a drug screening.
Skills
- Strong systems thinking with the ability to design scalable, reusable architecture patterns rather than point solutions.
- Deep technical and strategic understanding of AI engineering, platform architecture, and modern software systems, with the ability to translate these into business and operational impact.
- Ability to operate effectively at both deep technical and executive levels, bridging architecture, engineering execution, and business priorities.
- Strong orientation toward automation, reuse, and platform leverage over bespoke development approaches.
- Demonstrated ability to lead transformation of engineering practices, including adoption of AI-assisted and agent-enabled development models.
- Strong leadership and organizational design capability, with experience building and scaling multidisciplinary engineering and platform teams.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence across Product, Data, AI, Risk, and Business functions.
- Ability to balance speed, quality, cost efficiency, and regulatory compliance in a complex and evolving environment.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and leading teams through rapidly evolving technology landscapes, including emerging AI and agentic capabilities.
- AI-assisted development
- Agent-based development
- AI coding assistants
- AI-native development practices
- MLOps
- Lifecycle management
- Automation
- Orchestration
- RPA
- APIs
- System integrations
- Workflow orchestration frameworks
- Model development
- Model validation
- Model deployment
- Model monitoring
- Versioning
- Performance tracking
- Drift detection
- Reliability
- Scalability
- Cost efficiency
- Observability
- Governance
- Auditability
- Traceability
- Secure development practices
- Compliant development practices
Location
- Remote US (east coast preference)
Work Type
- Office
- Remote
Experience Level
- Senior leadership
- Band 9 level
Education Level
- Bachelor's degree
- Advanced degree preferred
Salary/Compensations
- $167,500.00–$278,000.00
- Variable annual bonus based on company, team, and/or individual performance results
Benefits
- A choice of national medical and dental plans, and a national vision plan, including health incentive programs
- Employee assistance and family support programs, including commuter benefits and tuition reimbursement
- At least 120 hours paid time off (PTO), 10 paid holidays annually, paid parental leave (3 weeks for bonding and 8 weeks for caregiver leave), accident and life insurance, and short- and long-term disability in accordance with company policy
- Retirement and savings programs, such as our competitive 401(k) U.S. retirement savings plan
- Employees’ Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) offers eligible colleagues the opportunity to purchase company stock at a discount
About the Company
- At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we are committed to fostering a healthy and harmonious workplace for our employees. We understand the importance of creating an environment that allows individuals to excel.
