Principal Research AI Innovation Lead

Working with Us
Challenging. Meaningful. Life-changing. Those aren’t words that are usually associated with a job. But working at Bristol Myers Squibb is anything but usual. Here, uniquely interesting work happens every day, in every department. From optimizing a production line to the latest breakthroughs in cell therapy, this is work that transforms the lives of patients, and the careers of those who do it. You’ll get the chance to grow and thrive through opportunities uncommon in scale and scope, alongside high-achieving teams. Take your career farther than you thought possible.

Bristol Myers Squibb recognizes the importance of balance and flexibility in our work environment. We offer a wide variety of competitive benefits, services and programs that provide our employees with the resources to pursue their goals, both at work and in their personal lives. Read more: careers.bms.com/working-with-us.

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.

We are seeking a Principal Research AI Innovation Lead to design, prototype, and scale AI-enabled capabilities that accelerate scientific research. This role will work across Research, AI, data, product, engineering, and enterprise technology teams to identify high-value opportunities, build practical LLM-enabled solutions, evaluate scientific quality, and create reusable capability patterns that improve how research teams use AI.

The ideal candidate combines hands-on AI product and prototyping experience with working fluency in drug discovery, translational science, or a related research domain. They can assess whether an AI output is scientifically sound, appropriately grounded, and useful for real research decisions - not merely technically complete. They are comfortable engaging with scientists on topics such as target evidence, indication selection, biomarker interpretation, translational rationale, or clinical evidence, and equally comfortable partnering with AI engineers to turn those needs into scalable systems.

This role’s impact is measured by scientific outcomes: faster and better-evidenced research decisions, higher-quality AI-assisted workflows, and reusable capabilities that compound across programs.

• Partner with scientists and research leaders to identify high-impact opportunities where AI can improve research speed, quality, consistency, traceability, and decision-making.
• Help shape multi-year GenAI strategies, lead workstreams, and establish reusable building blocks - agentic frameworks, evaluation harnesses, retrieval and grounding components, tool servers, prompt and policy libraries, and provenance infrastructure - on which research programs build.
• Architect and personally implement the agentic system-of-systems that executes complex, long-horizon scientific workflows across research, including target evidence assembly, indication rationale construction, biomarker interpretation, translational synthesis, literature and evidence triangulation, and decision support, with explicit attention to inter-agent coordination, state and memory management, verification, recovery from intermediate failure, and lifecycle governance of agents in production.
• Establish the scientifically rigorous evaluation, benchmarking, and reliability standards that critical research AI systems expected to meet, including curated benchmark datasets, expert-reviewed reference standards, rubric-based assessments, hallucination and grounding metrics, calibration of uncertainty, longitudinal monitoring, regression gating in production, and the governance under which those standards are applied.
• Design mechanisms for incorporating expert feedback, scientific rationale, provenance, and research context into AI workflows so that systems and institutional knowledge improve over time.
• Collaborate with engineering, data, IT, security, legal, vendor, and platform teams to ensure prototypes are designed with appropriate governance, integration paths, and scalability in mind.
• Communicate AI opportunities, risks, limitations, evidence quality, and results clearly to scientific, technical, and executive audiences.
• Stay current with emerging AI methods, tools, vendors, and industry practices, and assess where they can create practical value for Research.

• Bachelor's Degree 8+ years of academic / industry experience
• Or Master's Degree 6+ years of academic / industry experience
• Or PhD 4+ years of academic / industry experience

• Advanced degree, such as MS, PhD, PharmD, or equivalent experience in a scientific, computational, or AI-related field.
• Direct experience in one or more research areas such as target identification and evaluation, indication expansion, drug repurposing, biomarker discovery, translational research, clinical evidence review, or portfolio decision support.
• Ability to interpret scientific evidence, assess analytical quality, and evaluate whether AI-generated scientific outputs are grounded, appropriately caveated, and defensible.
• Substantive hands-on architectural depth in modern AI and large language model methods, including agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, long-horizon task execution, GraphRAG, Model Context Protocol (MCP) auth patterns, and deep research workflows with reasoning models, with the depth to define reference architectures and architectural standards rather than to integrate vendor APIs.
• Experience building AI systems that reason across heterogeneous scientific evidence, including genetic associations, clinical outcomes, literature, omics data, assay data, real-world data, or other biomedical data sources.
• Experience designing AI evaluation frameworks, benchmark datasets, human-reviewed reference standards, rubric-based assessments, or scientific quality metrics.
• Experience developing or adapting deep learning models for biological, biomedical, or translational research applications, including fine-tuning biology-focused large language models, multimodal generative models, protein or sequence foundation models, representation-learning models, or other domain-specific AI systems.
• Experience working in innovation-lab, accelerator, startup, skunkworks, or rapid-prototyping environments.

If you come across a role that intrigues you but doesn’t perfectly line up with your resume, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be one step away from work that will transform your life and career.

The starting compensation range(s) for this role are listed above for a full-time employee (FTE) basis. Additional incentive cash and stock opportunities (based on eligibility) may be available. The starting pay rate takes into account characteristics of the job, such as required skills, where the job is performed, the employee’s work schedule, job-related knowledge, and experience. Final, individual compensation will be decided based on demonstrated experience. 
Eligibility for specific benefits listed on our careers site may vary based on the job and location. For more on benefits, please visit https://careers.bms.com/life-at-bms/.
 

Benefit offerings are subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable plans in effect at the time and may require enrollment. Our benefits include:

• Health Coverage: Medical, pharmacy, dental, and vision care.

• Wellbeing Support: Programs such as BMS Well-Being Account, BMS Living Life Better, and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP).

• Financial Well-being and Protection: 401(k) plan, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, accident insurance, supplemental health insurance, business travel protection, personal liability protection, identity theft benefit, legal support, and survivor support.

​Work-life benefits include:

Paid Time Off

• US Exempt Employees: flexible time off (unlimited, with manager approval, 11 paid national holidays (not applicable to employees in Phoenix, AZ, Puerto Rico or Rayzebio employees)

• Phoenix, AZ, Puerto Rico and Rayzebio Exempt, Non-Exempt, Hourly Employees: 160 hours annual paid vacation for new hires with manager approval, 11 national holidays, and 3 optional holidays

Based on eligibility*, additional time off for employees may include unlimited paid sick time, up to 2 paid volunteer days per year, summer hours flexibility, leaves of absence for medical, personal, parental, caregiver, bereavement, and military needs and an annual Global Shutdown between Christmas and New Years Day.

All global employees full and part-time who are actively employed at and paid directly by BMS at the end of the calendar year are eligible to take advantage of the Global Shutdown.

*Eligibility Disclosure: The summer hours program is for United States (U.S.) office-based employees due to the unique nature of their work. Summer hours are generally not available for field sales and manufacturing operations and may also be limited for the capability centers. Employees in remote-by-design or lab-based roles may be eligible for summer hours, depending on the nature of their work, and should discuss eligibility with their manager. Employees covered under a collective bargaining agreement should consult that document to determine if they are eligible. Contractors, leased workers and other service providers are not eligible to participate in the program.

Uniquely Interesting Work, Life-changing Careers
With a single vision as inspiring as “Transforming patients’ lives through science™ ”, every BMS employee plays an integral role in work that goes far beyond ordinary. Each of us is empowered to apply our individual talents and unique perspectives in a supportive culture, promoting global participation in clinical trials, while our shared values of passion, innovation, urgency, accountability, inclusion and integrity bring out the highest potential of each of our colleagues.

On-site Protocol

BMS has an occupancy structure that determines where an employee is required to conduct their work. This structure includes site-essential, site-by-design, field-based and remote-by-design jobs. The occupancy type that you are assigned is determined by the nature and responsibilities of your role:

Site-essential roles require 100% of shifts onsite at your assigned facility. Site-by-design roles may be eligible for a hybrid work model with at least 50% onsite at your assigned facility. For these roles, onsite presence is considered an essential job function and is critical to collaboration, innovation, productivity, and a positive Company culture. For field-based and remote-by-design roles the ability to physically travel to visit customers, patients or business partners and to attend meetings on behalf of BMS as directed is an essential job function.

Supporting People with Disabilities

BMS is dedicated to ensuring that people with disabilities can excel through a transparent recruitment process, reasonable workplace accommodations/adjustments and ongoing support in their roles. Applicants can request a reasonable workplace accommodation/adjustment prior to accepting a job offer. If you require reasonable accommodations/adjustments in completing this application, or in any part of the recruitment process, direct your inquiries to [email protected]. Visit careers.bms.com/eeo-accessibility to access our complete Equal Employment Opportunity statement.

Candidate Rights

BMS will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, pursuant to applicable laws in your area.

If you live in or expect to work from Los Angeles County if hired for this position, please visit this page for important additional information: https://careers.bms.com/california-residents/

Data Protection

We will never request payments, financial information, or social security numbers during our application or recruitment process. Learn more about protecting yourself at https://careers.bms.com/fraud-protection.

Any data processed in connection with role applications will be treated in accordance with applicable data privacy policies and regulations.

If you believe that the job posting is missing information required by local law or incorrect in any way, please contact BMS at [email protected]. Please provide the Job Title and Requisition number so we can review. Communications related to your application should not be sent to this email and you will not receive a response. Inquiries related to the status of your application should be directed to Chat with Ripley.