Senior Life Sciences Knowledge Engineer

Senior Life Sciences Knowledge Engineer

Company: Norstella

Location: Remote, United States

Date Posted: Jun 9, 2026

Employment Type: Full Time

Job ID: R-2008

Description

About Norstella:

Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions provider dedicated to improving patient access to life-saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.

Norstella unites market-leading brands - Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, Skipta and The Dedham Group and delivers must-have answers and insights, leveraging AI, for critical strategic, clinical, and commercial decision-making. We help our clients:

• Accelerate the drug development cycle

• Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market

• Make data driven commercial and financial decisions

• Match and recruit patients for clinical trials

• Identify and address barriers to therapies

Norstella serves most pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the world, along with regulators like the FDA, and payers. By providing critical proprietary data supporting AI-driven workflows, Norstella helps clients make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Norstella’s investments in AI are transforming how data is consumed and decisions are made, disrupting inefficient legacy workflows and helping the industry become more efficient, innovative, and responsive to patient needs.

The Role:

As a Senior Life Sciences Knowledge Engineer at Norstella, you will sit at the intersection of deep scientific domain expertise and applied AI development. This role will be embedded within a group of life science thought leaders, but will interface across cross-functional teams of data scientists, machine learning engineers and data engineers. Your work centers on curating high-quality fine-tuned datasets which speak to the desired end-to-end behavior we want a model to internalize. The datasets and annotation guidelines/frameworks that govern it will play a critical role in our efforts to deliver predictive analytics and insights across clients.

Responsibilities:

• Translate complex clinical, regulatory, and life sciences subject matter expertise/requirements into repeatable patterns that can be taught to a model through gold standard examples, working closely with data scientists and machine learning engineers to shape the model’s schema, vocabulary, and target behavior.

• Through close collaboration between SME and technical colleagues, develop novel methods and parameters of model behavior, based on interpretation of requirements and quick iteration cycles.

• Design, build, and continuously refine fine-tuning datasets consisting of input/output pairs that demonstrate desired end-to-end behavior across the target task surface area, edge cases, and known failure modes.

• Author and maintain the annotation and labeling guidelines that govern dataset construction, ensuring the schema, vocabulary, and definition of “what good output looks like” remain consistent across contributors.

• Define the task taxonomy and output schema in close partnership with data scientists, ensuring data architecture aligns with downstream evaluation metrics and production requirements across NPD.

• Train and enable subject matter expert graders running eval rounds, including translating feedback to how data scientists implement improvements at the tool call layer.

• Run iterative dataset experiments: identify where the model is failing, design targeted example slices to close those gaps, and partner with the human-in-loop SMEs to measure the impact of each dataset change.

• Maintain provenance, licensing, and compliance documentation for every dataset, ensuring all training data meets GxP, regulatory, and intellectual property standards expected in life sciences and clinical settings.

• Conduct new proofs of concept for novel domain capabilities.

• Contribute to Norstella’s knowledge base and taxonomy work and help design new agentic workflows based on domain-grounded language models.

Qualifications:

• Graduate degree in life sciences, medical sciences, computer science or equivalent professional experience.

• At least 3 years of professional experience in production-grade life science datasets, including with AI-enabled applications.

• Experience working with structured publishing platforms and data tools; comfort with automation concepts

• Experience working with and statistically analysing large and complex data sets, including data cleaning and preprocessing.

• Experience working with Generative AI, especially LLMs, including agents, throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).

• Experience creating MCPs and consuming them into Agentic workflows.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently.

• Excellent communication skills, especially between technical and non-technical teams.

Bonus points if you have experience in:

• Experience in developing, evaluating, deploying, and monitoring algorithms and models from proof-of-concept, experimental stages through production, in a reproducible, auditable, GxP-compliant manner.

• Experience with the AWS ecosystem, specifically with services like S3, ECS, API Gateway, SageMaker, and Bedrock.

• Familiarity with CI/CD processes, especially as applied to ML operations (MLOps), preferably with Azure DevOps.

• Experience in fast-paced novel development cycles.

Our Guiding Principles for success at Norstella:

01: Bold, Passionate, and Mission-First

02: Integrity, Truth, and Reality

03: Kindness, Empathy, and Grace

04: Resilience, Mettle, and Perseverance

05: Humility, Gratitude, and Learning

Optional Immigration Section:

Please Note - All candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. We do not provide visa sponsorship or transfers. We are not currently accepting candidates who are on an OPT visa.

Benefits:

• Medical and Prescription Drug Benefits

• Health Savings Accounts (HSA) or Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)

• Dental & Vision Benefits

• Basic Life and AD&D Benefits

• 401k Retirement Plan with Company Match

• Company Paid Short & Long-Term Disability

• Paid Parental Leave

• Paid Time Off & Company Holidays

The expected base salary for this position ranges from $90,000 to $105,000. It is not typical for offers to be made at or near the top of the range. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including relevant skills, training, experience, education, and, where applicable, licensure or certifications obtained. Market and organizational factors are also considered. In addition to base salary and a competitive benefits package, successful candidates are eligible to receive a discretionary bonus.

Norstella is an equal opportunity employer. All job applicants will receive equal treatment regardless of race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability or handicap, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), marital or domestic partner status, military or veteran status, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, or any other protected characteristic as established by federal, state, or local law.

Sometimes the best opportunities are hidden by self-doubt. We disqualify ourselves before we have the opportunity to be considered. Regardless of where you came from, how you identify, or the path that led you here- you are welcome. If you read this job description and feel passion and excitement, we’re just as excited about you.

All legitimate roles with Norstella will be posted on Norstella’s job board which is located at norstella.com/careers. If a role is not posted on this job board, a candidate should assume the role is not a legitimate role with Norstella. Norstella is not responsible for an application that may be submitted by or through a third-party and candidates should proceed with extreme caution if a third-party approaches them about an open role with Norstella. Norstella will never ask for anything of value or any type of payment during or as part of any recruitment, interview, or pre-hire onboarding process. If you are aware of or have reason to believe a job posting purportedly for a role with Norstella is fraudulent or otherwise not authorized by Norstella, please contact the Company using the following email address: [email protected] .

Norstella is an equal opportunity employer. All job applicants will receive equal treatment regardless of race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability or handicap, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), marital or domestic partner status, military or veteran status, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, or any other protected characteristic as established by federal, state, or local law.