Associate Director, AI/ML Engineering

About the role

Acadia is committed to turning scientific promise into meaningful innovation that makes the difference for underserved neurological and rare disease communities around the world. Our commercial portfolio includes the first and only FDA-approved treatments for Parkinson’s disease psychosis and Rett syndrome. We are developing the next wave of therapeutic advancements with a robust and diverse pipeline that includes mid- to late-stage programs in Alzheimer’s disease psychosis and Lewy body dementia psychosis, along with earlier-stage programs that address other underserved patient needs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy agentic AI workflows that automate and transform complex business processes, leveraging multi-agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalent).
• Architect and implement MCP servers to expose enterprise tools, APIs, and data sources as standardized capabilities consumable by AI agents.
• Connect multi-agent systems to enterprise databases, internal APIs, and MCP servers to enable grounded, context-aware, and action-oriented AI solutions.
• Partner cross-functionally with internal teams to define data contracts, lineage standards, and quality thresholds required for AI/ML use cases.
• Design and implement agentic memory systems (short-term, long-term, episodic) and planning/reasoning loops to support reliable autonomous task execution.
• Evaluate agentic system performance across accuracy, reliability, latency, cost, and safety dimensions using structured benchmarks and red-teaming methodologies.
• Build and maintain guardrail frameworks (input/output filtering, content moderation, policy enforcement, hallucination detection) to ensure the safety, compliance, and trustworthiness of GenAI and agentic solutions.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, including chunking strategies, embedding models, vector store selection, and retrieval optimization for enterprise knowledge bases.
• Apply prompt engineering, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning techniques to adapt foundation models for domain-specific pharma use cases.
• Design, develop, validate, and deploy traditional machine learning models (classification, regression, clustering, time-series, survival analysis) to address structured business problems.
• Build and maintain end-to-end ML pipelines adhering to LLM Ops / ML Ops standards including model registry, evaluation benchmarks, prompt/version control, observability, and rollback procedures.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related quantitative discipline
• Minimum of 7 years of experience in AI/ML engineering, including at least 3 years of hands-on experience with Generative AI and agentic AI systems
• Expertise in multi-agent frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or similar technologies
• Strong experience in RAG pipeline development, embedding models, and vector database technologies
• Proficiency in Python and machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and Hugging Face
• Experience implementing ML Ops or LLM Ops practices, including model lifecycle management, evaluation, and deployment

Skills

• Experience working with real-world data (RWD), claims data, EHR data, Clinical Study data, translational and biological data and the corresponding databases is a plus

Benefits

What we offer US-based Employees:

• Competitive base, bonus, new hire and ongoing equity packages
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Employer-paid life, disability, business travel and EAP coverage
• 401(k) Plan with a fully vested company match 1:1 up to 5%
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan with a 2-year purchase price lock-in
• 15+ vacation days
• 13 -15 paid holidays, including office closure between December 24th and January 1st
• 10 days of paid sick time
• Paid parental leave benefit
• Tuition assistance

Pay

$172,000—$215,000 USD

Schedule

This role involves regular standing, walking, sitting, and the use of hands for handling or operating equipment. The employee may also need to reach, climb, balance, stoop, kneel, crouch, and maintain visual, verbal, and auditory communication in a standard office environment and while working independently from remote locations. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 20 pounds. This position requires the ability to travel independently overnight and/or work after hours as required by travel schedules or business needs.

Company Information

Acadia Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing innovative therapies for patients with neurological and rare diseases. The company is headquartered in San Diego, CA, with offices in South San Francisco, CA, and Princeton, NJ.