Principal AI Architect

McKesson is an impact-driven, Fortune 10 company that touches virtually every aspect of healthcare. We are known for delivering insights, products, and services that make quality care more accessible and affordable. Here, we focus on the health, happiness, and well-being of you and those we serve - we care.

What you do at McKesson matters. We foster a culture where you can grow, make an impact, and are empowered to bring new ideas. Together, we thrive as we shape the future of health for patients, our communities, and our people. If you want to be part of tomorrow's health today, we want to hear from you.

Position Summary:

The Principal AI Architect, Responsible AI is the enterprise's chief technical authority on responsible AI design and governance-by-architecture. This individual defines the standards, reference architectures, and technical guardrails that ensure every AI/ML system, from classical ML to agentic AI, meets regulatory, ethical, and quality thresholds before reaching production. The role bridges deep technical fluency with enterprise strategy, translating board-level risk appetite into enforceable architectural patterns across the full AI lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities:

* Define and maintain enterprise Responsible AI standards, policies, and technical guidelines covering fairness, explainability, robustness, privacy, and safety across all AI/ML modalities (predictive, generative, agentic).

* Establish model risk tiering frameworks aligned with regulatory requirements (e.g., EU AI Act risk categories, NIST AI RMF, FDA/SaMD where applicable) and map technical controls to each tier.

* Lead Enterprise Architecture Review Board (EARB) reviews for AI/ML solutions, ensuring compliance with responsible AI standards before production deployment.

* Partner with Legal, Compliance, Privacy, and Info Sec to translate regulatory and contractual obligations into testable technical requirements.

* Develop and evangelize an enterprise AI ethics review process including impact assessments, red-teaming protocols, and human-in-the-loop escalation criteria for high-risk use cases.

* Mentor and coach ML Engineers, Data Scientists, and Platform Engineers on responsible AI patterns and anti-patterns; create reusable design patterns, templates, and decision frameworks.

* Represent the enterprise's responsible AI posture to external auditors, regulators, customers, and industry working groups.

* Track the evolving responsible AI landscape (tooling, regulation, academic research) and recommend adoption of emerging capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications:

* Degree or equivalent and typically requires 13+ years, with 8+ years, of direct work related experience. Less years required if has relevant Master's or Doctorate qualifications.

Critical Experience/

Skills:

* Extensive experience in AI/ML engineering, architecture, or applied research with at least 3 years focused on AI governance, fairness, or safety.

* Deep expertise in at least two: bias/fairness measurement, explainability methods (SHAP, LIME, counterfactual), adversarial robustness, differential privacy, or AI safety alignment.

* Demonstrated experience authoring enterprise-level AI standards, policies, or reference architectures adopted across multiple business units.

* Strong working knowledge of regulatory frameworks: NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2 AI considerations, and sector-specific requirements (healthcare, financial services).

* Experience presenting technical governance topics to executive leadership and board-level audiences.

Preferred Experience /

Skills:

* Experience with agentic AI architectures and the unique governance challenges they present (tool-use authorization, multi-agent orchestration, autonomous decision boundaries).

* Contributions to responsible AI open-source projects, publications, or industry standards bodies.

* Healthcare or pharmaceutical industry experience.

* Master's degree (in Computer Science, AI/ML, Statistics, or related quantitative field) or PhD preferred.

We are proud to offer a competitive compensation package at McKesson as part of our Total Rewards. This is determined by several factors, including performance,…