Director, AI Engineering

PCI TRGR Penn Pharmaceutical Services Ltd; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

PCI Pharma Services is seeking a senior AI engineering leader to drive architectural direction, oversee enterprise AI initiatives, and partner with stakeholders to deliver scalable, secure AI solutions. The role focuses on governance, lifecycle management, and cross-functional collaboration across regulatory environments.

The candidate will guide MLOps/LLMOps practices, manage external partners, and ensure alignment with PCI architecture and security standards.

Qualifications

• 10+ years software/AI engineering leadership
• 5+ years leading technical teams or vendor-delivered solutions
• Experience with Generative AI, LLMs, and retrieval augmented generation
• Knowledge of AI governance, security controls, and regulatory considerations

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural direction and implementation guidance for enterprise AI initiatives
• Lead AI solution design, development, and deployment across business use cases
• Establish AI engineering standards, deployment patterns, and operational practices (MLOps/LLMOps)
• Collaborate with cybersecurity, data, and legal teams on governance and compliance

Skills

AI engineering leadership

Technical leadership

Cloud-native architectures

Vendor management

Regulatory/compliance awareness

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering/IT/AI

Tools

Azure AI Services

Azure OpenAI

AWS AI Services

Job description

Life changing therapies. Global impact. Bridge to thousands of biopharma companies and their patients. We are PCI. Our investment is in People who make an impact, drive progress and create a better tomorrow. Our strategy includes building teams across our global network to pioneer and shape the future of PCI.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The essential duties and responsibilities include the following, but other duties may be assigned. Serve as PCI's senior technical leader for AI engineering, providing architectural direction, technical oversight, and implementation guidance for enterprise AI initiatives. Partner with business and technology stakeholders to evaluate AI opportunities and determine appropriate technical approaches, architectures, and implementation strategies. Define and maintain AI engineering standards, reference architectures, design patterns, and best practices that support scalable, secure, and supportable solutions. Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and operationalization of AI solutions across customer-facing and internal business use cases. Establish solution patterns for generative AI, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, intelligent assistants, and AI-enabled automation. Design and oversee AI integrations across enterprise platforms, business applications, digital products, and the Enterprise Data Platform. Drive technical decision-making throughout the AI solution lifecycle from ideation through production deployment and ongoing optimization. Establish and maintain AI engineering, operational, MLOps, and LLMOps practices across development, testing, validation, and production environments. Implement processes for model lifecycle management, monitoring, observability, testing, version control, and continuous improvement. Ensure AI solutions are engineered for scalability, reliability, maintainability, supportability, and operational readiness. Partner with Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Quality, and Data Engineering teams to implement technical controls supporting PCI's AI governance framework. Partner with Legal, Procurement, Cybersecurity, Quality, and business stakeholders to assess the technical feasibility, operational impact, and implementation requirements of AI-related contractual commitments, security controls, data protection requirements, and regulatory obligations. Support AI risk assessments, validation activities, audit readiness efforts, and governance reviews as required. Ensure AI solutions align with regulatory requirements, security standards, privacy requirements, responsible AI principles, and applicable quality processes. Monitor, forecast, and optimize AI-related platform, licensing, model consumption, infrastructure, and operational costs. Establish metrics and reporting related to AI adoption, operational effectiveness, solution performance, cost optimization, and business value realization. Serve as the primary technical lead for AI-related vendors, consultants, contractors, and implementation partners. Direct and oversee AI solution delivery performed by external development teams and strategic technology partners. Evaluate emerging AI technologies, products, platforms, models, service providers, and industry practices to support technical decision-making and innovation. Ensure partner-delivered solutions align with PCI architecture standards, quality expectations, delivery commitments, and business objectives. Build and mature PCI's AI engineering capability, including future team development, mentoring, knowledge sharing, and engineering excellence. Foster a culture of innovation, responsible experimentation, continuous improvement, and technical learning across the AI engineering function.

Completes all job duties in compliance with company policies, SOPs, safety rules, and all applicable federal, state, local, quality, and regulatory requirements, including OSHA, FDA, and cGMP standards. This position may require overtime and/or weekend work. Knowledge of and adherence to all PCI, cGMP, and GCP policies, procedures, rules. Attendance of work is an essential function of this position. Performs other duties as assigned by Manager/Supervisor.

Special Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. The employee must be physically capable to perform the duties listed below with or without reasonable accommodations which may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions Stationary Position: From 1/4 to 1/2 of the day. Move, Traverse: From 1/4 to 1/2 of the day. Operate, activate, use, prepare, inspect, or place: None Install, place, adjust, apply, measure, use, or signal: None. Ascend/Descend or Work Atop: None. Position self (to) or Move (about or to): None. Communicate or exchange information: 3/4 of the day and up. Detect, distinguish, or determine: None. On an average day, the individual can expect to move and/or transport up to 10 pounds less than 1/4 of the day. This position may have the following special vision requirements. Close Vision ☐ Distance Vision ☐ Color Vision ☐ Peripheral Vision ☐ Depth Perception Ability to focus ☒ No Special Vision Requirements Work Environment: The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The following are some environmental conditions that one may be exposed to on a daily basis and for various lengths of time. Work is primarily performed at a desk and/or in an office environment. for 1/4 to 1/2 of the day. The noise level in the work environment is typically, quiet.

Qualifications:

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field. 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, platform engineering, AI engineering, data engineering, or related technology disciplines, including experience leading complex enterprise technology initiatives. 5+ years of leadership experience managing technical teams, projects, vendor-delivered solutions, or engineering functions. Demonstrated experience serving as a senior technical authority for AI initiatives, including evaluation of AI use cases, selection of technical approaches, architectural decision-making, technical governance, vendor oversight, and operationalization of AI solutions. Experience with Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic AI systems, enterprise AI platforms, and modern AI solution architectures. Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, APIs, integration patterns, and the design of scalable, secure, and supportable enterprise solutions. Experience establishing and supporting operational practices for AI solutions, including lifecycle management, monitoring, governance, observability, and continuous improvement. Strong understanding of cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, responsible AI principles, and implementation of technical controls within regulated or governance-driven environments. Experience working with external vendors, consulting partners, contractors, managed service providers, and offshore delivery teams to deliver technology solutions and business outcomes. Demonstrated ability to evaluate emerging technologies, communicate effectively with technical and business stakeholders, and translate strategic opportunities into scalable technical solutions.

Preferred:

Master’s degree in computer science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field. Experience with Microsoft Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, AWS AI Services, Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or similar enterprise AI platforms. Experience establishing MLOps, LLMOps, AI observability, model monitoring, and AI governance capabilities within enterprise environments. Experience designing and deploying AI-enabled digital products, enterprise knowledge management solutions, intelligent automation, agentic workflows, and AI-driven business process transformation initiatives. Pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, or other highly regulated industry experience, including support for validation, audit readiness, quality systems, or regulatory compliance requirements.

Join us and be part of building the bridge between life changing therapies and patients. Let’s talk future

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Statement:

PCI Pharma Services is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We do not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, marital or domestic or civil union status, familial status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetics, disability, military eligibility or veteran status, or any other protected status. At PCI, Equity and Inclusion are at the core of our company’s purpose: Together, delivering life-changing therapies. We are committed to cultivating an inclusive workplace by holding ourselves accountable to the highest standards of understanding, fairness, respect, and equal opportunity – at every level. We envision a PCI community where everyone can belong and grow, and we strive to bring this vision to reality by continuously and intentionally assessing our people practices, policies and programs, marketing approach, and workplace culture.

Why work for PCI Pharma Services?

At PCI, we have an uncompromising focus on providing quality and operational excellence and providing the industry leading customer experience. Our people make all of this happen, so providing an industry leading experience for our people is equally as important. By creating an authentic culture of purposeful work, we aspire to be an interesting and fulfilling place for talented individuals to grow careers. We live a philosophy of intentional learning combined with real-life experience supported by a fair and competitive rewards program. We are individuals, teams and a company that believes in our purpose and our approach is simple, the people who work at PCI fuel our business; we don’t say no, we figure out how.