Senior Leader, AI Systems

Most diseases are still poorly understood at a biological level. Despite decades of research, the causal mechanisms driving many conditions remain unclear, limiting our ability to identify the right targets, design the right interventions and bring the right medicines to patients. The AI Accelerator exists to change that. Based in London and sitting within Computational Innovation, a global organisation spanning computational biology, human genetics, data excellence and AI, the Accelerator’s mission is to build production-quality AI capabilities that deepen our understanding of disease biology and increase probability of success.

We do this by applying neural-based methods across the biomedical data landscape to integrate heterogeneous, multimodal data sources, infer biological relationships and embed causal thinking into what we build. The goal is not just to predict but to explain and understand why disease occurs. It could be electronic health records and medical imaging to support patient segmentation. It could be ‘omics data to identify novel therapeutic targets. It could be predicting transcriptional change for a given disease-causing variant. It could be simulating the effect of modulating a target of interest.

A core component of the AI Accelerator is AI Systems, a team focused on designing, building and deploying multimodal foundation models across the vast biomedical data landscape that will be used within Computational Innovation to enhance and accelerate portfolio decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of world-class AI scientists and ML engineers focused on provisioning state of the art, foundational AI capabilities that support disease understanding, target discovery and safety.
• Build out a senior scientific leadership layer of domain experts below that takes on defined technical problems, owns the solution approach and leads teams to deliver them.
• Sit on the AI Accelerator Leadership Team, and help shape the Accelerator’s technical strategy and set the innovation and capability build direction to achieve AI Accelerator and CI goals through appropriate resourcing.
• Drive the team from architecture design through training and engineering to production quality models and model artefacts ready for deployment, setting standards for model performance across AI Systems initiatives and partnering with AI Reasoning to build trust in model outputs to enable confident decision-making.
• Build and leverage partnerships with academic and third-party collaborators as key force multipliers.
• Build the team’s external reputation through publications and a presence at top-tier ML conferences to attract and retain top talent, while remaining true to the mission of helping patients.

Requirements

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computational Biology or related field, with an understanding of foundation model architectures and what it takes to build performant models that scale.
• Strong track record building and leading high-performing technical teams that build and productionise biomedical AI capabilities for pharmaceutical research and development and experience leading leaders.
• Experience shaping AI innovation strategy and translating strategy into execution, with appropriately resourced teams, turning research into real-world impact.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, underpinned by a knowledge of pharma R&D to understand their needs and the ability to translate AI work to those outside the AI specialism.
• Previous pharma R&D experience is advantageous.

This is a hybrid role with approximately 4 days a week in the office.

Why This Is A Great Place To Work

Boehringer Ingelheim has been recognised as a Top Employer in the UK, demonstrating our commitment to building an exceptional workplace through strong people practices and supportive HR policies.