Principal Research AI Innovation LeadWe are seeking a
Principal Research AI Innovation Lead to design, prototype, and scale AI-enabled capabilities that accelerate scientific research. This role will work across Research, AI, data, product, engineering, and enterprise technology teams to identify high-value opportunities, build practical LLM-enabled solutions, evaluate scientific quality, and create reusable capability patterns that improve how research teams use AI.
The ideal candidate combines hands-on AI product and prototyping experience with working fluency in drug discovery, translational science, or a related research domain. They can assess whether an AI output is scientifically sound, appropriately grounded, and useful for real research decisions - not merely technically complete. They are comfortable engaging with scientists on topics such as target evidence, indication selection, biomarker interpretation, translational rationale, or clinical evidence, and equally comfortable partnering with AI engineers to turn those needs into scalable systems.
This role's impact is measured by scientific outcomes: faster and better-evidenced research decisions, higher-quality AI-assisted workflows, and reusable capabilities that compound across programs.
Key Responsibilities- Partner with scientists and research leaders to identify high-impact opportunities where AI can improve research speed, quality, consistency, traceability, and decision-making.
- Help shape multi-year GenAI strategies, lead workstreams, and establish reusable building blocks - agentic frameworks, evaluation harnesses, retrieval and grounding components, tool servers, prompt and policy libraries, and provenance infrastructure - on which research programs build.
- Architect and personally implement the agentic system-of-systems that executes complex, long-horizon scientific workflows across research, including target evidence assembly, indication rationale construction, biomarker interpretation, translational synthesis, literature and evidence triangulation, and decision support, with explicit attention to inter-agent coordination, state and memory management, verification, recovery from intermediate failure, and lifecycle governance of agents in production.
- Establish the scientifically rigorous evaluation, benchmarking, and reliability standards that critical research AI systems expected to meet, including curated benchmark datasets, expert-reviewed reference standards, rubric-based assessments, hallucination and grounding metrics, calibration of uncertainty, longitudinal monitoring, regression gating in production, and the governance under which those standards are applied.
- Design mechanisms for incorporating expert feedback, scientific rationale, provenance, and research context into AI workflows so that systems and institutional knowledge improve over time.
- Collaborate with engineering, data, IT, security, legal, vendor, and platform teams to ensure prototypes are designed with appropriate governance, integration paths, and scalability in mind.
- Communicate AI opportunities, risks, limitations, evidence quality, and results clearly to scientific, technical, and executive audiences.
- Stay current with emerging AI methods, tools, vendors, and industry practices, and assess where they can create practical value for Research.
Basic Qualifications- Bachelor's Degree 8+ years of academic / industry experience
- Or Master's Degree 6+ years of academic / industry experience
- Or PhD 4+ years of academic / industry experience
Preferred Qualifications- Advanced degree, such as MS, PhD, PharmD, or equivalent experience in a scientific, computational, or AI-related field.
- Direct experience in one or more research areas such as target identification and evaluation, indication expansion, drug repurposing, biomarker discovery, translational research, clinical evidence review, or portfolio decision support.
- Ability to interpret scientific evidence, assess analytical quality, and evaluate whether AI-generated scientific outputs are grounded, appropriately caveated, and defensible.
- Substantive hands-on architectural depth in modern AI and large language model methods, including agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, long-horizon task execution, GraphRAG, Model Context Protocol (MCP) auth patterns, and deep research workflows with reasoning models, with the depth to define reference architectures and architectural standards rather than to integrate vendor APIs.
- Experience building AI systems that reason across heterogeneous scientific evidence, including genetic associations, clinical outcomes, literature, omics data, assay data, real-world data, or other biomedical data sources.
- Experience designing AI evaluation frameworks, benchmark datasets, human-reviewed reference standards, rubric-based assessments, or scientific quality metrics.
- Experience developing or adapting deep learning models for biological, biomedical, or translational research applications, including fine-tuning biology-focused large language models, multimodal generative models, protein or sequence foundation models, representation-learning models, or other domain-specific AI systems.
- Experience working in innovation-lab, accelerator, startup, skunkworks, or rapid-prototyping environments.
If you come across a role that intrigues you but doesn't perfectly line up with your resume, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be one step away from work that will transform your life and career.
Compensation Overview:Remote - United States - US: $145,020 - $175,728
The starting compensation range(s) for this role are listed above for a full-time employee (FTE) basis. Additional incentive cash and stock opportunities (based on eligibility) may be available. The starting pay rate takes into account characteristics of the job, such as required skills, where the job is performed, the employee's work schedule, job-related knowledge, and experience. Final, individual compensation will be decided based on demonstrated experience.
Eligibility for specific benefits listed on our careers site may vary based on the job and location. For more on benefits, please visit https://careers.bms.com/life-at-bms/.
Benefit offerings are subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable plans in effect at the time and may require enrollment. Our benefits include:
- Health Coverage: Medical, pharmacy, dental, and vision care.
- Wellbeing Support: Programs such as BMS Well-Being Account, BMS Living Life Better, and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP).
- Financial Well-being and Protection: 401(k) plan, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, accident insurance, supplemental health insurance, business travel protection, personal liability protection, identity theft benefit, legal support, and survivor support.
Work-life benefits include:Paid Time Off
- US Exempt Employees: flexible time off (unlimited, with manager approval, 11 paid national holidays (not applicable to employees in Phoenix, AZ, Puerto Rico or Rayzebio employees)
- Phoenix, AZ, Puerto Rico and Rayzebio Exempt, Non-Exempt, Hourly Employees: 160 hours annual paid vacation for new hires with manager approval, 11 national holidays, and 3 optional holidays
Based on eligibility*, additional time off for employees may include unlimited paid sick time, up to 2 paid volunteer days per year, summer hours flexibility, leaves of absence for medical, personal, parental, caregiver, bereavement, and military needs and an annual Global Shutdown between Christmas and New Years Day.
All global employees full and part-time who are actively employed at and paid directly by BMS at the end of the calendar year are eligible to take advantage of the Global Shutdown.
*Eligibility Disclosure: The summer hours program is for United States (U.S.) office-based employees due to the unique nature of their work. Summer hours are generally not available for field sales and manufacturing operations and may also be limited for the capability centers. Employees in remote-by-design or lab-based roles may be eligible for summer hours, depending on the nature of their work, and should discuss eligibility with their manager. Employees covered under a collective bargaining agreement should consult that document to determine if they are eligible. Contractors, leased workers and other service providers are not eligible to participate in the program.
