Director, AI Reliability, Testing & Performance

Novartis; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 186,000; Full time

Job summary

Novartis in London seeks a Director of AI Systems Reliability, Testing & Performance. You will define how AI systems across Development are evaluated, tested, validated, benchmarked and monitored throughout their lifecycle.

This senior leadership role owns the technical evidence for reliability, security and fitness-for-use, guiding evaluation, testing, observability and production-readiness across agentic AI, models, and digital twins.

Qualifications

• Senior AI leadership role within Data Science & AI.
• Responsible for defining evaluation, benchmarking, testing and validation methodologies for AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Define evaluation methodologies for AI systems, models, agents, digital twins, and simulation environments across Development.
• Establish benchmark suites, evaluation datasets, and testing harnesses used across AI initiatives.
• Define objective measures for quality, reliability, robustness, grounding, agent effectiveness, and task success.
• Ensure evaluation approaches remain scientifically rigorous, reproducible, and comparable across AI systems.
• Build a common evidence framework for assessing AI capabilities, limitations, and fitness-for-use.
• Establish approaches for hallucination testing, failure-mode analysis, robustness testing, and behavioral validation.
• Define validation methodologies for agentic systems, digital twins, simulation environments, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Develop production readiness criteria for AI systems operating in Development environments.
• Support technical validation activities required for GxP-relevant and regulated AI systems.
• Ensure AI systems are tested under realistic operating conditions and supported by objective validation evidence.
• Define how AI system reliability, degradation, drift, and operational performance are measured over time.
• Establish monitoring requirements and performance assessment frameworks across Development AI systems.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure required evaluation, monitoring, tracing, and observability signals are available.
• Define methods for identifying, diagnosing, and assessing AI system failures.
• Promote evidence-based improvement of deployed AI capabilities.
• Establish portfolio-wide approaches for capturing technical evidence related to AI quality, reliability, robustness, and performance.
• Define standard reporting for benchmark results, validation findings, monitoring signals, and reliability assessments.
• Create transparency into AI system strengths, limitations, and failure modes.
• Generate technical evidence supporting validation, audit, inspection, and governance activities.
• Enable objective decisions on AI system readiness, reliability, and fitness-for-use.

Job description

Novartis in London seeks a Director of AI Systems Reliability, Testing & Performance. You will define how AI systems across Development are evaluated, tested, validated, benchmarked and monitored throughout their lifecycle.

This senior leadership role owns the technical evidence for reliability, security and fitness-for-use, guiding evaluation, testing, observability and production-readiness across agentic AI, models, and digital twins.