Principal Scientist, Translational AI Foundations
Bristol Myers Squibb · Cambridge Crossing, Massachusetts, United States
At Bristol Myers Squibb, our employees often ask, “Who are you working for?”—a question that fuels collaboration, accountability, and urgency in our work. Our purpose-driven culture inspires us to discover, develop, and deliver innovative medicines to prevail over serious diseases. We offer uniquely interesting and meaningful work, opportunities for growth, and a supportive environment that values inclusion, wellbeing, flexibility, and comprehensive benefits. This is work that transforms the lives of patients, and the careers of those who do it.
When you join BMS, you are joining a high-achieving team united by a common mission.
The Informatics and Predictive Sciences (IPS) mission is to Pioneer, Partner and Predict to drive transformative insights for patient benefit. IPS conducts applied computational research in areas that include genomic, structural and molecular informatics, computational and systems biology, patient selection and translational biomarker research, and broader fields including knowledge science, epidemiology and machine learning—across the full lifecycle of drug discovery and development and across all therapeutic areas at BMS. We do this in close partnership with scientific and clinical experts in the field, both inside and outside the company. We perform innovative science to empower key data-driven decisions across a rich pipeline of next-generation medicines. In doing so, our work transforms the lives of patients, as well as our own lives and careers.
Here, you’ll get the chance to grow and thrive through opportunities that are uncommon in scale and scope. You’ll pursue innovative ideas while advancing professionally alongside some of the brightest minds in biopharma.
Principal Scientist, Translational AI Foundations (Platform, Deployment and Knowledge Systems)
Position Summary
Translational IPS is forming Translational AI Foundations (TAIF), a small team of computational biologists and AI engineers that works side by side with our translational research groups. TAIF turns the biomarker analyses scientists already perform by hand into validated, reusable AI agents and workflows, then transfers each one to the research group that will use and maintain it. The science stays with those groups; TAIF builds the shared tools that make it faster and reproducible.
We are seeking a Principal Scientist to own the shared software platform the whole team builds on: the pieces no translational research group should have to build for itself. You will turn the team's engineering standards into tooling, own the ontology and knowledge graph as a shared service, and build versioned connections to our governed data. You will deploy validated tools as reliable services (REST APIs, tool servers, containers) with CI/CD, monitoring and a rollback plan. The initial scientific focus is circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA): its data connection and reference dataset, then, after the first spatial agents, a ctDNA agent built with the team's assay scientist. Deployment here means engineering deployment; broader adoption in the research groups is led by the team lead, with your hands-on support.
This role is for an architect who still builds: someone who has shipped governed data foundations and production services that scientists depend on, who understands the cost and value of regulated traceability (audit trails, versioning, validation evidence), and who has started building agentic automation on that foundation. You will build on the existing enterprise data platforms in partnership with the data, IT and knowledge-management teams that own them.
What you will have to work with
Established enterprise data platforms to connect to, not to rebuild. Governed data products on Databricks, the biomarker data stores behind our early-phase clinical studies (RNA-seq, ctDNA, WES, TCR-seq and CTC, with flow cytometry, cytokine profiling, IHC, proteomics, PK/PD and clinical data), an enterprise data catalog, an enterprise AI platform offering several large language models, and AWS cloud compute. Data operations, governance and the pipelines themselves sit with established partner teams; this role builds the data connections and a common data model on top of them.
An assay scientist on the same team who owns the scientific test cases and pass criteria that your validation pipeline applies, builds the assay agents on your platform, and co-builds the ctDNA agent with you.
Long-term owners for what you build. Established platform, research engineering and IT teams take over long-term operation of mature components.
Designated AI contacts in each translational research group who build tools using the team's templates, attend your hands-on sessions, and take ownership of what is deployed.
Your contributions will speed translational decisions across the BMS early clinical portfolio and help bring new medicines to patients sooner.
You will apply these resources across two areas:
- The shared platform and knowledge systems. The majority of the role: the shared software platform, engineering standards as tooling, the ontology and knowledge graph, and the connections to governed data.
- Deployment, hand-off and measurement. The remainder: deploying every validated tool, packaging it for the team that will own it, usage measurement, and direct work with translational research groups.
Key Responsibilities
The shared platform and knowledge systems
- Shared software platform. Build and maintain provenance tracking (data, code, model and prompt versions behind every number), evaluation tooling, access control, logging and usage telemetry, to enterprise security and release standards.
- Engineering standards as tooling. Implement the tool template, the automated test and validation pipeline, packaging of tools for use by AI agents (for example as Model Context Protocol tool servers), and a registry of tools with their owners, versions, lifecycle stages and users.
- Knowledge systems. Own the ontology and the knowledge graph service that hold the team's canonical biomarker definitions (their scientific content comes from the assay scientist). Start with a biomarker-trial ontology covering subjects, cohorts, visits, specimens, assays, endpoints and cutoffs, starting from the definitions scientists already use and connected to the enterprise data catalog.
- Data connections and governance. Build and maintain approved, versioned connections to the governed data products and biomarker data stores, recording the data version on every read; map clinical studies into a common data model; coordinate data logistics and governance with the data owners, starting with ctDNA.
Deployment, hand-off and measurement
- Deployment and operations. Containerize and deploy each validated tool and service (Docker; AWS ECS or Kubernetes on EKS, or the platform the owning team runs) with CI/CD, monitoring and a rollback plan, and own the release checklist (validation, access, monitoring, support owner, rollback) with the platform teams.
- Hand-off packaging and measurement. Package every component for the team that will own it (documentation, tests, versioning, a registry entry linked to its test cases) so it can be taken over unchanged. Instrument every tool for usage reporting (users, teams, elapsed and review time, test results, use after hand-off) and report usage and impact metrics.
- Research-group partnership. Work with the AI contacts in translational research groups: run hands-on tool-building sessions and review the tools they build against the team's engineering standards and for deployability.
- Engineering influence. Set the engineering practice the team and the AI contacts follow (code review, tests, versioning, release discipline), mentor junior team members on it, and document the shared platform so that its owning team can run it without you.
Basic Qualifications
- Ph.D. in computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, data engineering or a related qu