Principal Software Engineer (AI)

IDBS; Woking; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care programs

Paid time off

Job summary

IDBS in Woking is looking for a Principal Software Engineer (AI) to lead the design and delivery of GenAI-enabled capabilities. The role requires expertise in deploying AI systems and collaborating with data scientists to enhance drug discovery and clinical development processes. A competitive benefits program is offered, including healthcare and paid time off. Candidates with experience in life sciences and familiarity with AI engineering best practices are preferred.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to deploy AI systems into production environments.
• Experience in designing and operating LLM-powered capabilities.
• Strong understanding of data drift monitoring and cost management.

Responsibilities

• Lead delivery of AI-enabled platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with data scientists and bioinformaticians.
• Establish engineering best practices for GenAI applications.

Skills

AI system deployment

Document summarisation

Data pipeline development

Mentoring engineers

Collaborating with cross-functional teams

Tools

Databricks

AWS

Job description

Bring more to life.

At IDBS, one of Danaher’s 15+ operating companies, our work saves lives—and we’re all united by a shared commitment to innovate for tangible impact.

IDBS helps BioPharma organizations unlock the potential of AI/ML to improve the lives of patients, serving as a trusted long‑term partner to 80% of the top 20 global BioPharma companies with cloud software and services tailored to the sector.

Our solutions leverage 35 years of scientific informatics expertise to design, execute, and orchestrate processes, manage, contextualize and structure data, and gain valuable insights throughout the product lifecycle, from R&D through manufacturing.

The Principal Software Engineer (AI) will provide technical leadership in the design and delivery of production‑grade, GenAI‑enabled capabilities across IDBS platforms. The role focuses on applying large language models to real enterprise data: scientific, clinical, and operational to enable AI‑driven discoverability, summarisation, reporting, and decision support.

Operating at principal level, you will be hands‑on, guiding teams through the transition from POC to early adoption and general release and help establish sustainable AI engineering practices across the department.

The engineer will collaborate closely with data scientists, bioinformaticians, and domain experts to deliver intelligent solutions for knowledge extraction, decision support, and workflow automation.

In This Role, You Will Have The Opportunity To:

• Lead the delivery of AI‑enabled platform capabilities that accelerate insight and decision making across drug discovery, clinical development, and commercial operations.
• Design and productionise scalable GenAI solutions using approaches such as retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), MCP‑style integrations, and selectively applied agentic patterns, balancing capability, cost, performance, and trust to deliver measurable value from proof‑of‑concept through early adoption and general release.
• Translate scientific and business use cases into robust AI system designs that integrate cleanly with data platforms, workflows, and APIs.
• Establish engineering best practices for GenAI/LLM applications, including system design patterns, evaluation approaches, reliability, scalability, and maintainability standards across the AI engineering lifecycle.
• Act as a technical leader by mentoring engineers, influencing architectural direction, and driving the successful delivery and adoption of GenAI capabilities across IDBS platforms.

The Essential Requirements Of The Job Include:

• Designing, building, and operating LLM‑powered capabilities such as document summarisation, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and question answering over enterprise datasets.
• Developing AI‑ready data foundations, including unstructured data pipelines, metadata extraction and enrichment, and hybrid architectures using vector stores alongside relational databases.
• Proven ability to deploy AI systems into production environments, with effective monitoring of model behaviour, data drift, cost, and latency, and the judgment to make pragmatic trade‑offs for reliability, scalability, and enterprise adoption.
• Establishing robust operational practices, including versioning of prompts, models, and data, and implementing feature flags and controlled rollout strategies for AI capabilities.
• Collaborating effectively with cross‑functional partners (e.g., data science and domain experts), providing technical leadership, and mentoring others while driving delivery in complex environments.

Desirable (but Not Essential):

• Experience applying GenAI solutions in life sciences / biopharma contexts, including scientific, clinical, or regulated (GxP‑aligned) environments.
• Familiarity with building AI capabilities that support knowledge extraction, decision support, and workflow automation across enterprise data ecosystems, including cloud‑based platforms such as Databricks and AWS.
• Experience defining or contributing to organisational best practices for AI engineering, including evaluation methods, governance, and scalable adoption approaches for generative/agentic AI.

Benefits:

IDBS, a Danaher operating company, offers a broad array of comprehensive, competitive benefit programs that add value to our lives, including health care programs and paid time off. For more information, visit Danaher Benefits Info.