Principal Research Scientist

• Compensation: USD 124,500 - USD 236,500 - yearly

About Abb Vie

Abb Vie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas including immunology, oncology and neuroscience - and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about Abb Vie, please visit us at  .

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The Principal Data Scientist is the senior technical and scientific leader for Abb Vie's omnichannel engagement analytics, a data- and analytics-driven engagement optimization program spanning channel mix, content, field representative call planning, and orchestration. Operating within the APEX Enterprise Advanced Analytics and Innovation team, this role sets the multi-year science vision for personalized commercial engagement and is accountable for the technical strategy, methodology, and scientific rigor of the AI/ML and statistical solutions that power it.

Reporting to the Associate Director, Data Science, the Principal is a thought partner to commercial and analytics leadership: shaping which problems are worth solving, forming and defending a point of view on how AI creates measurable business value, and partnering with product owners to turn that vision into scalable solutions. The role combines deep, hands-on expertise in applied machine learning, generative AI, causal inference, and experimentation with the consultative skill to align a complex stakeholder ecosystem around the right answer.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the Data Science vision:
  Own the multi-year Data Science vision and technical roadmap for omnichannel engagement analytics, anticipating where both the business and the field of AI are heading.
• Shape how AI creates business value: identify, size, and prioritize opportunities where AI can drive measurable commercial impact, build the business case, and influence senior leadership decisions on where to invest.
• Lead hands-on with Gen-AI:
  Personally use AI-assisted development and agentic tools to prototype, test hypotheses, and demonstrate value quickly; build LLM-backed systems using advanced RAG and context engineering, paired with rigorous scientific evaluation frameworks to scale highly reliable omnichannel recommendations.
• Lead the design of predictive and causal models:
  Develop next-best-action, recommendation, and sequential decision models that inform customer engagement and resource allocation using complex, multi-source data.
• Own measurement science: set the standard for measuring effectiveness, incrementality, and business impact using experimental and quasi-experimental methods, so that AI investments are evaluated rigorously.
• Partner with product owners to shape problems, not just fulfill requirements: co-define business outcomes, scope, and success metrics, and translate them into scalable technical solutions.
• Navigate a complex stakeholder ecosystem: build alignment across brand and marketing leaders, field sales and operations, Medical, Legal and Regulatory (MLR), Compliance, BTS, Digital Lab, and external vendors; reframe requests into well-posed problems and resolve competing priorities.
• Communicate with executive impact: translate complex methods and findings into clear recommendations and compelling narratives for executive and non-technical audiences.
• Productionize at scale:
  Partner with BTS, Digital Lab, engineering, and platform teams to deploy, monitor, and manage the lifecycle of AI/ML solutions.
• Raise the bar for scientific rigor: establish best practices in model development, code quality, reproducibility, peer review, and responsible AI across the data science community.
• Be a thought leader: stay at the forefront of research and practice in machine learning, generative AI, and causal inference; bring new ideas into the team; provoke rigorous analytical debate; and represent Abb Vie's point of view internally and in the broader analytics community.

Supervisory / Management Responsibilities

This role does not carry formal direct report responsibilities but is expected to act as a technical leader and mentor across the broader data science community, raising the bar on scientific rigor and hands-on AI practice. The Principal Data Scientist may lead technical work streams with external analytics vendors…