Principal Research AI Innovation Lead

Role Description

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
• Clinical evidence

They are 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
• Reusable capabilities that compound across programs

Key Responsibilities

• 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.
• Architect and personally implement the agentic system-of-systems that executes complex, long-horizon scientific workflows across research.
• Establish scientifically rigorous evaluation, benchmarking, and reliability standards for critical research AI systems.
• Design mechanisms for incorporating expert feedback, scientific rationale, provenance, and research context into AI workflows.
• 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.

Qualifications

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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.
• Experience building AI systems that reason across heterogeneous scientific evidence.
• 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.
• Experience working in innovation-lab, accelerator, startup, skunkworks, or rapid-prototyping environments.

Compensation Overview

Remote - United States - US: $145,020 - $175,728. 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.

Benefits

• 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:
• Flexible time off (unlimited, with manager approval)
• 11 paid national holidays
• Additional time off for employees may include unlimited paid sick time, up to 2 paid volunteer days per year, summer hours flexibility, and leaves of absence for various needs.