Senior Principal AI/ML Engineer

GSK is a global leader in pharmaceuticals and healthcare, with a relentless commitment to advancing healthcare for the betterment of humanity. Our mission is to help people around the world do more, feel better, and live longer. We achieve this by researching, developing, and providing innovative medicines and vaccines. Our dedication to scientific excellence and ethical practices guides everything we do.

R&D at GSK is highly data-driven, and we're applying AI/ML and data engineering to generate new insights, enable analytics, gain efficiencies and automation. This role is based in an AI/ML team that is already working on projects involving Generative AI, Information Retrieval, NLP/NER/RE, document classification, and has won awards and recognition for its work. The team's future projects will be in diverse areas, such as regulatory, clinical, legal and HR. Versatility is key, with an ability to quickly understand domain data and requirements and translate them into solutions.

You will interact with architects, software and data engineers, modelers, product owners as well as other team members in Clinical Solutions and R&D. You will actively participate in creating technical solutions, designs, implementations and participate in the relentless improvement of R&D Tech systems in alignment with agile and DevOps principles.

We're looking for demonstrable expertise across a selection of the following key competencies:

• Generative AI
• Model building, training and evaluation
• Natural language processing
• Classification problems
• Data engineering
• Software development

You should also be versed in agile ways of working, source control and the Azure cloud.

In this role you will have the opportunity to work on a mixture of the following:

• Generative AI Design and develop RAG based applications
• LLM fine-tuning, including preparation of training sets from internal data
• Agent-based applications
• Evaluating use-case specific LLMs
• NLP: Named Entity Recognition across a variety of unstructured data
• Evaluating and training BERT-like models such as GLiNER, NuNER for NER tasks
• Analysing trade-offs between these models and LLMs for NLP tasks
• Relationship Extraction: Evaluating different models for use-case specific RE, such as ATG
• Document and text Classification
• Data Engineering Designing and implementing data pipelines for model training and inference
• Building scalable data processing systems
• Optimizing data workflows and storage solutions
• Implementing robust ETL processes
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies and models
• Cross-team collaboration, identifying innovations and architecting solutions
• Provide leadership and technical direction to various business units and partners

Qualifications & Skills:

We are looking for professionals with these required skills to achieve our goals:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science
• Significant experience working in AI/ML and Python
• Strong Python programming skills with demonstrated expertise in building production-grade applications
• Generative AI: Demonstrable experience of RAG, including chunking strategies, vectorising and indexing data, retrieval strategies and reranking, prompting strategies, function calling. Our current tech-stack is OpenAI, LangChain, Azure AI, Python, pg_vector, Sinequa.
• AI/ML: Hands-on experience with training and evaluating BERT-like models in real-world applications, especially in NLP or classification problems
• Data Engineering: Experience with data pipeline development, ETL processes, and working with large datasets
• Hands-on experience with ML tools like TensorFlow, PyTorch etc.
• Experience with Azure cloud (AKS, Azure AI, ADF, Document Intelligence etc.)
• Excellent problem-solving skills and software engineering practices
• Excellent communication skills

Preferred Qualifications & Skills:

If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science
• Generative AI: Experience of multi-agent systems (LangGraph, Autogen, CrewAI etc.) would be a plus, as would experience of multimodal LLMs (like GPT4 Omni, Qwen-vl, DocOwl etc.) for understanding complex documents and images. Experience in training, evaluating and hosting open source LLMs would be a major benefit.
• Some experience with MLOps would be very beneficial
• Full-stack development experience
• Experience with UI technologies like React would be helpful
• Experience with building search applications using Azure Search, Sinequa, Elastic or anything Lucene-based would be beneficial
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)

Closing Date for Applications: Friday 13th June 2025 (COB)

Please take a copy of the Job Description, as this will not be available post closure of the advert. When applying for this role, please use the ‘cover letter’ of the online application or your CV to describe how you meet the competencies for this role, as outlined in the job requirements above. The information that you have provided in your cover letter and CV will be used to assess your application.

During the course of your application, you will be requested to complete voluntary information which will be used in monitoring the effectiveness of our equality and diversity policies. Your information will be treated as confidential and will not be used in any part of the selection process.

If you require a reasonable adjustment to the application / selection process to enable you to demonstrate your ability to perform the job requirements, please contact 0808 234 4391. This will help us to understand any modifications we may need to make to support you throughout our selection process.

GSK is an Equal Opportunity Employer. This ensures that all qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), parental status, national origin, age, disability, genetic information (including family medical history), military service or any basis prohibited under federal, state or local law.

We believe in an agile working culture for all our roles. If flexibility is important to you, we encourage you to explore with our hiring team what the opportunities are.