Principal Research AI Innovation Lead

About the role

Working at Bristol Myers Squibb is challenging, meaningful, and life-changing. Here, uniquely interesting work happens every day, in every department—from optimizing a production line to the latest breakthroughs in cell therapy. This role offers the chance to grow and thrive through opportunities uncommon in scale and scope, alongside high-achieving teams united by a common mission.

The Informatics and Predictive Sciences (IPS) mission is to Pioneer, Partner, and Predict to drive transformative insights for patient benefit. IPS conducts applied computational research in areas that include genomic, structural and molecular informatics, computational and systems biology, patient selection and translational biomarker research, and broader fields including knowledge science, epidemiology, and machine learning—across the full lifecycle of drug discovery and development and across all therapeutic areas at BMS. We perform innovative science to empower key data-driven decisions across a rich pipeline of next-generation medicines, transforming the lives of patients as well as our own lives and careers.

Responsibilities

• Partner with scientists and research leaders to identify high-impact opportunities where AI can improve research speed, quality, consistency, traceability, and decision-making.
• Help shape multi-year GenAI strategies, lead workstreams, and establish reusable building blocks—agentic frameworks, evaluation harnesses, retrieval and grounding components, tool servers, prompt and policy libraries, and provenance infrastructure—on which research programs build.
• Architect and personally implement the agentic system-of-systems that executes complex, long-horizon scientific workflows across research, including target evidence assembly, indication rationale construction, biomarker interpretation, translational synthesis, literature and evidence triangulation, and decision support. Focus on inter-agent coordination, state and memory management, verification, recovery from intermediate failure, and lifecycle governance of agents in production.
• Establish scientifically rigorous evaluation, benchmarking, and reliability standards for critical research AI systems, including curated benchmark datasets, expert-reviewed reference standards, rubric-based assessments, hallucination and grounding metrics, calibration of uncertainty, longitudinal monitoring, regression gating in production, and governance frameworks.
• Design mechanisms for incorporating expert feedback, scientific rationale, provenance, and research context into AI workflows to ensure systems and institutional knowledge improve over time.
• Collaborate with engineering, data, IT, security, legal, vendor, and platform teams to ensure prototypes are designed with appropriate governance, integration paths, and scalability in mind.
• Communicate AI opportunities, risks, limitations, evidence quality, and results clearly to scientific, technical, and executive audiences.
• Stay current with emerging AI methods, tools, vendors, and industry practices, and assess where they can create practical value for Research.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree with 8+ years of academic/industry experience, or
• Master’s Degree with 6+ years of academic/industry experience, or
• PhD with 4+ years of academic/industry experience.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree (MS, PhD, PharmD, or equivalent) in a scientific, computational, or AI-related field.
• Direct experience in one or more research areas such as target identification and evaluation, indication expansion, drug repurposing, biomarker discovery, translational research, clinical evidence review, or portfolio decision support.
• Ability to interpret scientific evidence, assess analytical quality, and evaluate whether AI-generated scientific outputs are grounded, appropriately caveated, and defensible.
• Substantive hands-on architectural depth in modern AI and large language model methods, including agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, long-horizon task execution, GraphRAG, Model Context Protocol (MCP) auth patterns, and deep research workflows with reasoning models. Ability to define reference architectures and architectural standards.
• Experience building AI systems that reason across heterogeneous scientific evidence, including genetic associations, clinical outcomes, literature, omics data, assay data, real-world data, or other biomedical data sources.
• Experience designing AI evaluation frameworks, benchmark datasets, human-reviewed reference standards, rubric-based assessments, or scientific quality metrics.
• Experience developing or adapting deep learning models for biological, biomedical, or translational research applications, including fine-tuning biology-focused large language models, multimodal generative models, protein or sequence foundation models, representation-learning models, or other domain-specific AI systems.
• Experience working in innovation-lab, accelerator, startup, skunkworks, or rapid-prototyping environments.

Pay

Remote - United States: $145,020 - $175,728 (full-time employee basis). Additional incentive cash and stock opportunities may be available based on eligibility. The starting pay rate reflects required skills, job location, and relevant experience. Final compensation will be determined by demonstrated experience.

Benefits

• Health Coverage: Medical, pharmacy, dental, and vision care.
• Wellbeing Support: 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:
  • Paid Time Off (U.S. Exempt Employees): Flexible time off (unlimited, with manager approval) and 11 paid national holidays (not applicable to employees in Phoenix, AZ, Puerto Rico, or Rayzebio).
  • Phoenix, AZ, Puerto Rico, and Rayzebio Employees: 160 hours annual paid vacation for new hires (with manager approval), 11 national holidays, and 3 optional holidays.
  • Additional time off based on eligibility: unlimited paid sick time, up to 2 paid volunteer days per year, summer hours flexibility, leaves of absence for medical, personal, parental, caregiver, bereavement, and military needs, and an annual Global Shutdown between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

All global full- and part-time employees actively employed and paid directly by BMS at the end of the calendar year are eligible for the Global Shutdown.