Senior Data Scientist - AI engineering Clinical

About the Department

Our Research & Development organization brings together the best minds in life science innovation. The teams located in Lexington, Watertown, Cambridge, and Plainsboro reflect the full R&D continuum, from early research through late‑stage clinical development. We are building for the future, creating a distinct R&D community based on collaboration, partnerships, and cutting‑edge research across multiple modalities and therapeutic areas. Improving human health starts here and patients rely on us.

Our R&D hub merges biotech speed and agility with large pharmaceutical company quality, resources, and stability, uniting the best of both worlds to develop new medicines for patients.

Senior Data Scientist II – research team focus on exploring and creating new technology to become a world leader in data science within our fields. Responsibilities include data collection, preparation, engineering, and software engineering in a data science context. The role develops and validates algorithms and models, guides junior Data Scientists, and supports networking within a complex global organization. Open to hiring at the Lead level commensurate with experience.

Reports to the Associate Director of the Clinical AI development area. Works closely with fellow Data Scientists, AI Engineers, System Architects, medical professionals, clinical trial squad members, and biostatisticians to ensure solutions are grounded in clinical context and meet drug development workflow needs.

• Develop and validate LLM‑based solutions for content retrieval, generation, summarization, and inference applied to healthcare and drug development challenges.
• Enable and assist in software engineering for AI products: architect services, design APIs, build backend systems, and integrate with front‑end applications while meeting performance, safety, privacy, and ethics requirements.
• Build and maintain data solutions, including vector databases, embedding pipelines, and knowledge bases to support retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) and document understanding.
• Collaborate with other data scientists to design, code, train, test, deploy, and iterate on machine learning systems.
• Explore model‑driven reasoning through prompt engineering, model fine‑tuning techniques (supervised, LoRA, PEFT, etc.), and optimization methods (quantization, distillation, caching).
• Create technical documentation, runbooks, and training materials for model usage and maintenance.
• Accomplish objectives with a high degree of self‑sufficiency.
• Collaborate with other Data Scientists and engineers from other disciplines to complete daily tasks.
• Actively participate in cross‑functional teams to develop AI and ML solutions.
• Stay current on GenAI/LLM research, best practices, and technology roadmap.
• Achieve business goals, share learnings, knowledge, and skills, and promote cross‑functional teamwork.
• Raise the level of competency in the team by seeking and sharing domain knowledge in Data Science and Novo Nordisk’s therapy areas.

Up to 10% overnight travel required.

• Master’s degree or PhD highly preferred;
  Bachelor’s degree required.
• Master’s with 4+ years’ experience, PhD with 2+ years’ experience, or Bachelor’s with 6+ years’ experience considered.
• Experience working in LLM and generative AI domain: model selection, system design, fine‑tuning, prompt engineering, evaluation, and observation.
• Foundational understanding of deep/reinforcement learning models and architectures such as transformers, GANs, VAEs, etc.
• Experience designing agentic solutions to tackle healthcare problems with evaluation considerations.
• Proven programming skills in Python and familiarity with data science and ML tooling (Jupyter Notebook, Hugging Face, PyTorch).
• Experience building data pipelines and retrieval systems (vector databases, embedding pipelines, knowledge bases) to support RAG, graphs, and document understanding.
• Preferred experience in pharmaceutical or healthcare industry, regulated medical device development, or another regulated field.
• Experience deploying agentic solutions to tackle healthcare problems.
• Fami…