Associate Director, AI Engineer

About the role

Novartis is hiring four Associate Directors, AI Engineering to join Biomedical Research Data & Digital, Software & Workflows and help shape agentic AI capabilities across Novartis Biomedical Research. The role is a hands-on technical leadership position, not a people-management one: leadership is exercised through technical direction, architecture, engineering excellence and influence. It is open to candidates based in Prague, Czech Republic or Basel, Switzerland.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture and design of agentic AI platforms end to end, staying hands-on through development, deployment, monitoring and reliability.
• Turn complex technical problems from ambiguous business or scientific needs into production-grade solutions.
• Drive the transformation of products, processes and scientific workflows into scalable agentic AI capabilities, including drug discovery, workflow automation and lab-in-the-loop systems.
• Own architecture decisions for large-scale LLM inference on AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore, balancing reliability, latency, cost, security and governance.
• Establish engineering best practices and reference architectures for performance, scalability, security and maintainability.
• Define and advance DevOps, MLOps and AgentOps standards, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerization, reproducible pipelines and model/data/prompt versioning.
• Guide evaluation, integration and optimization of AI models, agent orchestration frameworks and platform components.
• Define evaluation and observability standards, including agent test sets, tracing and cost and latency monitoring.
• Partner with product, data, architecture, security and scientific stakeholders on technical roadmaps and standards.
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, coding standards and technical mentorship.

Required profile

• 8+ years of professional software and/or AI engineering experience, including production-grade AI solutions and a strong track record as a hands-on technical lead.
• Deep hands-on expertise building AI agents on AWS, including Amazon Bedrock, Agents, Knowledge Bases, Guardrails and Bedrock AgentCore.
• Strong Python expertise and experience with AWS services such as Lambda, Step Functions, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3 and IAM.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, chunking, embeddings, vector stores (OpenSearch or pgvector) and tool use/function calling; Model Context Protocol experience preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous problems into secure, resilient production solutions with guardrails, error handling and governance.
• Ability to set technical direction, drive design decisions and communicate complex trade-offs to stakeholders.

Required skills

• Proficiency with at least one agent framework such as Strands, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI or custom orchestration.
• DevOps/MLOps expertise, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code with CDK or Terraform, containers and orchestration.
• Desirable: experience with AI coding tools, AgentOps, AI governance and compliance (including awareness of the EU AI Act).

What we offer

• Expected annual base salary of 1,354,220 to 2,514,980 CZK, with a possible performance-based bonus.
• Flexible and hybrid working options where possible, and a minimum of 14 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Insurance plans, retirement plans, wellbeing resources and global recognition programs.