Senior Clinical AI Scientist - Trials & Development

AstraZeneca plc; Barcelona; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

AstraZeneca plc in Barcelona is seeking a Senior Scientist to lead hands‑on research and technical delivery of advanced AI models and agentic systems for clinical‑development decisions and workflows.

You will work at the intersection of frontier AI and biomedical science, applying rigorous methods to address treatment-effect heterogeneity, biomarker discovery, and patient stratification while ensuring responsible use in medicine development.

Qualifications

• Hold an MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Biostatistics, Biomedical Informatics, Computational Biology, or a closely related quantitative field, or have a BSc with substantial equivalent experience.
• Have independently delivered a meaningful AI or ML research project, workstream, model, evaluation, or software capability from initial question through a clear and reproducible result.
• Have a record of strong research or technical contributions, such as peer‑reviewed work, validated models, reusable software, datasets, benchmarks, patents, or deployed capabilities.
• Bring expertise in relevant research topics, such as unsupervised learning, dimensionality reduction, causal inference, survival or longitudinal analysis, Bayesian modeling, multimodal learning, domain adaptation, model interpretability.
• Are comfortable working with AI agent harnesses, quick to pick up new approaches, and curious about what makes agents useful, reliable, and safe.
• Have strong Python and scientific‑computing skills and experience with a modern ML framework such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Can explain technical findings, tradeoffs, and limitations to clinical, statistical, regulatory, engineering, and leadership audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end scientific and technical delivery of one or more clinical AI workstreams, from problem definition and data assessment through prototyping, validation, translation, and iteration.
• Adapt and apply emerging AI methods to clinical‑development problems, investigate failure modes, and make clear recommendations based on the evidence
• Build and evaluate agentic AI systems for clinical‑development use cases, including retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory, multi‑step workflows, and human oversight.
• Write high-quality Python and build reproducible research workflows using modern ML frameworks, version control, testing, and cloud or high-performance computing environments.
• Act as a senior scientific and technical partner across the organization, influencing clinical strategy, evaluation approaches, platform capabilities, and investment decisions.
• Share your work through peer‑reviewed publications, reusable tools, patents, scientific collaborations, and conference presentations where appropriate.
• Build the research culture of the team through scientific review, constructive challenge, and mentorship of scientists and engineers. Represent AstraZeneca with external partners, scientific consortia, regulators, and the research community

Skills

Python

ML research

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Multimodal learning

Agentic AI

Survival analysis

Clinical development

Communication

Education

MSc or PhD in Computer Science, ML, Biostatistics, Biomedical Informatics, Computational Biology

BSc with substantial equivalent experience

Tools

Cloud computing

High-performance computing

Python tooling

Version control

Job description

AstraZeneca plc in Barcelona is seeking a Senior Scientist to lead hands‑on research and technical delivery of advanced AI models and agentic systems for clinical‑development decisions and workflows.

You will work at the intersection of frontier AI and biomedical science, applying rigorous methods to address treatment-effect heterogeneity, biomarker discovery, and patient stratification while ensuring responsible use in medicine development.