Senior Director, AI and Machine Learning– Evinova

AstraZeneca; City Of London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative health tech firm in London seeks a Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning to lead AI development and manage a high-performing team. This hands-on technical expert will drive innovative solutions to improve drug R&D processes by employing state-of-the-art AI and Machine Learning techniques. Join a mission to transform clinical trials and deliver impactful healthcare solutions.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in applied machine learning with a strong focus on deep learning.
• Proven track record of developing creative AI solutions.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of agentic AI applications.
• Mentor and develop an AI team.
• Drive technical and project-level architecture decisions.

Skills

Applied machine learning

Deep learning

NLP

Generative AI

Python

AWS services

TypeScript

Education

Ph.D. or equivalent experience

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

DeepSpeed

Job description

Overview

On average, it takes more than 10 years to develop a drug and costs more than $1.3b. Over 70% of drug R&D cost is spending on clinical development and the success rate from phase I to approval is only around 10%. At Evinova, a new health tech business as part of the AstraZeneca Group, we are on a mission to halve the cost and cycle time of clinical trials by using state of the art AI and Machine Learning.

If you are a solid coder with hands-on experience developing AI agentic solutions, a strong understanding of modern deep learning, robust AWS skills, and a voracious learner, you could be a fantastic fit for our team. A background in Biostatistics and Causal Inference will be a strong add-on.

Talent with ambition to grow into a role will be a key differentiator of a successful candidate. Glass ceiling smashers especially welcome.

We are looking for a Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning to lead our AI and ML development. This role is a technical expert driving hands-on development from prototyping to production-ready systems. The role will focus on solving complex clinical development challenges using AI and Machine Learning. From design of AI agents, communication architectures for agents, and developing automated techniques for designing and evaluating agentic systems, to traditional deep learning model development (as well as Causal Machine Learning) deployment. The role will interact with product, design, engineering, MLops, and domain experts and partners. This is a hands-on role with management responsibility and some time will be spent coding.

On top of technical expertise, this role is also expected to hire and nurture a high-performing team. In-person working enables faster pace and collaboration, with a preference for on-site presence.

About the role:

This is a hands-on role with management responsibility, expect 50% time spent on coding.

You will

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of sophisticated agentic AI applications tailored to life sciences/health tech challenges.
• Develop automated techniques for designing and evaluating agentic systems.
• Ideate, develop, and evaluate different tools for agents (e.g., search, memory, context compression, communication architectures for agents).
• Design specialized agent/LLM observability pipelines for prototypes and production systems.
• Develop bespoke deep learning models, from model design, training, testing to deployment.
• Use causal machine learning for decision making.
• Hire, mentor and develop an AI team, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning, led by example with best ML and software engineering practices.
• Lead a portfolio of high-impact AI projects.
• Drive technical and project-level architecture decisions, guiding multi-functional teams through stages of the AI lifecycle.
• Deliver production-ready code.
• Collaborate in a multidisciplinary environment to align AI initiatives with business objectives and drive digital transformation.
• Represent the company's AI expertise at conferences, publications, and industry events.

Required Skills/Experience

• Ph.D. or equivalent experience in a relevant field (such as mathematics, computer science, data science, etc).
• 10+ years of proven experience in applied machine learning, with a strong focus on deep learning, NLP, and generative AI.
• Proven track record of developing creative and novel AI solutions that have driven significant business impact.
• Extensive prior experience exploring and testing large language model behaviour, prompting and building products with language models.
• Expert knowledge of Python and advanced ML/LLM frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc).
• Deep understanding of agentic AI concepts and frameworks (e.g., agentic design patterns, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning) and their applications in healthcare.
• Previous experience of training (fine-turning) large language models, hands-on experience with DeepSpeed.
• Extensive experience with AWS services (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock, MSK, EKS, OpenSearch).
• Proven track record of shipping production-level code with best software engineering practices.
• Experience with containerization technologies, CI/CD, front and backend of web applications.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with experience presenting to executive leadership and partners.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and inspire multi-functional teams.
• Experience with TypeScript.
• Experience with AWS CDK.
• Demonstrated technical leadership experience, including successful delivery of large-scale AI projects.
• Experience designing and implementing novel AI architectures or algorithms in real-world products.

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Experience with low-level languages used for implementing high-performance ML code (C/C++, Rust, CUDA, etc.).
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or development of proprietary AI frameworks.
• Expertise in areas such as reinforcement learning, few-shot learning, meta-learning, Causal AI.
• Experience of Biostatistics.

Knowledge of drug development and previous experience working in the pharmaceutical industry is nice to have but not required.

Why Evinova?

Evinova draws on AstraZeneca’s deep experience developing novel therapeutics, informed by insights from thousands of patients and clinical researchers. Together, we can accelerate the delivery of life-changing medicines, improve the design and delivery of clinical trials for better patient experiences and outcomes, and think more holistically about patient care. We aim for solutions that work across the sector and benefit patients broadly. By bringing our solutions to the wider healthcare community, we can help build unified approaches to how we develop and deploy digital technologies, better serving our teams, physicians, and ultimately patients. Evinova represents a unique opportunity to deliver meaningful outcomes with digital and AI to serve the wider healthcare community.

Join us on our journey of building a new kind of health tech business to reset expectations of what a bio-pharmaceutical company can be.

Interested? Come and join our journey.

So, what’s next?

Are you already imagining yourself joining our team? Good, because we can’t wait to hear from you.

Where can I find out more?

Our social media: Follow Evinova on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/evinova/)

Learn more about Evinova: evinova.com

Date Posted 23-sep-2025

Closing Date 12-okt-2025

Our mission is to build an inclusive and equitable environment. We want people to feel they belong at AstraZeneca and Alexion, starting with our recruitment process. We welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of characteristics. We offer reasonable adjustments/accommodations to help all candidates to perform at their best. If you have a need for any adjustments/accommodations, please complete the section in the application form.