Director, Applied AI Engineering

As Director of Applied AI Engineering, you will lead the execution engine behind Pfizer's most critical AI innovations-transforming ideas into scalable, high-value enterprise solutions. Your mandate spans multiple AI work-streams sponsored by Executive Leadership and focusing on agentic solutions and generative AI.

Reporting into the Lead of Applied AI and Agentic Solutions, you will manage a team of senior AI Engineers delivering prototypes, minimum viable products (MVPs), and technical showcases that serve as the front-end of enterprise transformation. This role blends deep technical leadership, product engineering strategy, and direct enablement of enterprise use cases. You will partner closely with business and technical stakeholders to design and deliver robust, scalable products that demonstrate the value of AI across our enterprise. This role is execution-oriented with strong influence on the AI solution lifecycle-from ideation to hand-off.

Why This Role Matters

High-impact AI use cases don't succeed on theory-they succeed on execution. This role ensures Pfizer can operationalize AI rapidly, safely, and credibly. You will drive the design and implementation of agentic AI solutions that are tested with real users, grounded in technical excellence, and ready for enterprise deployment. Your work enables AI strategy to scale across business units and geographic markets, driving measurable value for ELT-backed priorities and their sponsoring leaders.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead the technical execution and engineering strategy for enterprise-critical AI use cases.
• Lead and grow a cross-functional team focused on delivering high-quality AI/ML PoCs, prototypes and use cases
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, product owners, and domain experts to scope and shape impactful AI solutions
• Translate high-level business opportunities into concrete technical implementation plans, partnering closely with business, product, and architecture leaders
• Define and enforce engineering best practices across AI prototyping, including architecture patterns, documentation standards, quality gates, and reproducibility criteria.
• Oversee the build of pilots and MVPs with clear transition plans to delivery, ensuring full readiness for scale-up by platform and software engineering teams.
• Act as a key contributor to the Applied AI strategy and Pfizer's broader agentic AI framework, including involvement in shared component development and internal tooling.
• Partner with cross-functional teams (DevOps, Platform, Data, Architecture) to ensure robust integration, infrastructure compatibility, and lifecycle support for engineered solutions.
• Represent the Applied AI team in technical and business forums, providing strategic insight, surfacing risks, and championing best practices in AI engineering.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of a Bachelor's Degree, preferably in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) or related field, required
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or applied AI roles, with 3+ years in a leadership position
• Deep experience delivering AI/ML solutions from concept to pilot in enterprise environments, preferably across multiple business domains.
• Expertise in one or more areas such as NLP, time series, LLMs, generative models, and traditional machine learning
• Strong technical foundation in machine learning, generative AI, and MLOps best practices.
• Track record of shipping working systems with high stakeholder engagement and successful adoption.
• Demonstrated ability to lead senior technical talent and align engineering execution with broader business priorities.
• Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in highly regulated industries (e.g. pharma, healthcare, finance)
• Expertise in LLM-based applications, multi-agent systems, or agent orchestration frameworks.
• Familiarity with benchmarking, interpretability, and risk mitigation techniques for applied AI.
• Experience building reusable scaffolding, templates, and internal accelerators for AI development.
• Strong record of cross-functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and architecture groups.

Pfizer is an equal opportunity employer and complies with all applicable equal employment opportunity legislation in each jurisdiction in which it operates.

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