Associate Director, AI Development Lead

Job Description

Jazz Pharmaceuticals is a global biopharma company whose purpose is to innovate to transform the lives of patients and their families. We are dedicated to developing life-changing medicines for people with serious diseases - often with limited or no therapeutic options. We have a diverse portfolio of marketed medicines, including leading therapies for sleep disorders and epilepsy, and a growing portfolio of cancer treatments.

Our patient-focused and science-driven approach powers pioneering research and development advancements across our robust pipeline of innovative therapeutics in oncology and neuroscience. Jazz is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with research and development laboratories, manufacturing facilities and employees in multiple countries committed to serving patients worldwide. Please visit  for more information.

The Associate Director, AI Development Lead is a strategic technical leader responsible for advancing Jazz Pharmaceuticals’ enterprise AI capability and driving measurable business value through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Reporting to the Director, Enterprise AI, this role will spend much of its time in delivery - designing systems, writing production-quality code, reviewing colleagues’ work, and guiding a small team of AI developers working across traditional data science (AI/ML) and modern Generative AI (GenAI) approaches.

AI development at Jazz follows a hub-and-spoke operating model. Business functions (spokes) own use-case prioritization, stakeholder alignment, early-stage ideation, and some proof-of-concept development. The central Digital Enterprise Capabilities (DEC) team (hub) serves as an advisory partner at any stage and progressively takes on a hands-on development role as solutions mature - ensuring production-grade standards for data readiness, model quality, code maturity, and reliability.

The business is accountable for deciding what gets built; DEC owns how it gets built and deployed.

The role will also partner with the Director, Enterprise AI and the VP of Data, AI, and Research to help shape Jazz’s enterprise AI strategy - operating model, governance, technology stack, best practices, and policies - and serve as a trusted subject-matter expert to teams across Jazz who are evaluating use cases, prioritizing initiatives, and vetting vendors. As the team and capability mature, the balance of the role will naturally evolve toward broader technical oversight and a larger share of strategic work, while continuing to direct the most important technical decisions.

• Build and ship end-to-end ML solutions - data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring - across supervised, unsupervised, and other classical/statistical learning paradigms.
• Design and ship end-to-end GenAI solutions - including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, agentic workflows, vector stores, and integrations with foundation model APIs.
• Across Gen AI and AI/ML, write production-quality code (Python or related languages/frameworks as needed), with attention to readability, modularity, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Design and review architectures across Gen AI and AI/ML solutions that are secure, reusable, and rigorous. Work with the Enterprise AI Architect to ensure your designs follow our architectural standards.
• Debug, profile, and optimize solutions - including cost, latency, accuracy, and reliability trade-offs.
• Support deployment and post-deployment operations, including CI/CD, observability, model monitoring, drift detection, and incident response.
• Establish and continuously refine technical standards for development: reference architectures, design patterns, coding conventions, evaluation methodologies, and reusable components.
• Lead a small team of AI developers across traditional ML and Generative AI, setting clear technical direction, priorities, and quality expectations.
• Be accountable for the quality and outcomes of the team’s work: solution design, code and model quality, documentation, and delivery.
• Mentor team members through code & design review, both informal and formal feedback; build technical depth and ownership across the team.
• Plan and sequence delivery work in partnership with stakeholders, balancing scope, technical risk, and timelines.
• Help recruit, onboard, and grow AI talent as the team expands.
• Serve as a go-to technical advisor to teams across Jazz, many of them non-technical, helping them:…