Director, Principal AI Engineer

About the role

Bristol Myers Squibb is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to lead a small, cross-functional pod in designing and delivering generative AI solutions that transform core business processes across various functions.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 technical teams and senior leadership.
• Contribute to shared patterns, templates, and components for future accelerator projects.
• Embed responsible AI practices, including basic safety, evaluation, and guardrail considerations in GenAI solutions.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Science, Business, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, data science, or related technology roles with increasing responsibility.
• Proven track record designing and delivering GenAI and traditional software applications.
• Deep expertise in Python; experience with TypeScript and modern frontend development (e.g., React).
• Strong experience with MCP, context engineering, multi-modal GenAI inputs, and vector databases.
• Hands-on experience with AWS; familiarity with Azure and/or GCP is a plus.
• Practical experience with Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock.
• Effective use of coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI).
• Comfort with GitHub and DevOps practices.
• Knowledge of and experience in agile ways of working.
• Demonstrated people-management experience leading small engineering/data teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills across technical and executive audiences.

Benefits

• Health Coverage: Medical, pharmacy, dental, and vision care.
• Wellbeing Support: Programs such as BMS Well-Being Account, BMS Living Life Better, and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP).
• Financial Well-being and Protection: 401(k) plan, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, accident insurance, supplemental health insurance, business travel protection, personal liability protection, identity theft benefit, legal support, and survivor support.
• Work-life Benefits Include Paid Time Off.