Senior Manager, Machine Learning Platform Engineer (United States - California - Foster City)

This job is with Gilead Sciences Inc., an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

At Gilead, we're creating a healthier world for all people. For more than 35 years, we've tackled diseases such as HIV, viral hepatitis, COVID-19 and cancer - working relentlessly to develop therapies that help improve lives and to ensure access to these therapies across the globe. We continue to fight against the world's biggest health challenges, and our mission requires collaboration, determination and a relentless drive to make a difference.

 

Every member of Gilead's team plays a critical role in the discovery and development of life-changing scientific innovations. Our employees are our greatest asset as we work to achieve our bold ambitions, and we're looking for the next wave of passionate and ambitious people ready to make a direct impact.

 

We believe every employee deserves a great leader. People Leaders are the cornerstone to the employee experience at Gilead and Kite. As a people leader now or in the future, you are the key driver in evolving our culture and creating an environment where every employee feels included, developed and empowered to fulfil their aspirations. Join Gilead and help create possible, together.

Job Description

This ML Platform Engineer will have the unique opportunity to apply cutting-edge data and AI technologies to one of the most meaningful challenges in healthcare: ensuring the quality of medicines that improve and save lives. As a pivotal member of R&D Quality, this role will help transform how quality insights are generated, scaled, and acted upon across Gilead's drug development and clinical research programs. Through the operationalization of machine learning models, data pipelines, and advanced analytics platforms, the successful candidate will enable more proactive quality oversight, smarter decision-making, and continuous improvement, ultimately supporting Gilead's mission to deliver life-changing therapies to patients worldwide.

The ML Platform Engineer will partner with the Quality Analytics & Insights team, a small, high-impact group responsible for advancing data science, analytics, and AI capabilities across R&D Quality. This role will build and maintain the ML and data infrastructure that supports Quality Performance and Quality Health models focused on signal detection, risk analytics, early identification of emerging issues, mitigation strategies, and continuous improvement. Working closely with data scientists, the engineer will operationalize models through robust data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, automation, and MLOps practices, transforming analytical prototypes into scalable, production-ready solutions. The role will collaborate directly with Quality teams, IT, and global delivery teams to support key Quality System elements and programs, including Audit, Deviation, CAPA, Risk Management, Escalation/Serious Breach, and Quality Analytics/Data Science, while helping define the technology roadmap for next-generation analytics, automation, and AI capabilities across the organization.

Primary Responsibilities

ML & Data Engineering

• Technical Ownership: Operate as a self-directed contributor who scopes, plans, and drives initiatives end-to-end - translating ambiguous Quality problems into technical solutions, making sound architectural trade-offs, and delivering production outcomes with minimal oversight.

• Infrastructure & Environment Automation: Independently provision and manage cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and containerization, standing up reproducible, scalable environments for training, serving, and experimentation with minimal reliance on external teams.

• Model Lifecycle Management: Develop and maintain pipelines to transition models from experimentation to production, including packaging, CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment. Support model serving for Quality use cases such as signal detection, risk analytics, and Quality Performance/Quality Health models.

• Data Pipeline Development: Design robust batch and streaming data workflows; integrate, define, and manage feature sets, lineage, and reuse across QMS data sources (e.g., Audit, Deviation, CAPA, Risk Management).

• Data Orchestration: Author and schedule reliable, observable workflows using orchestration tools and distributed processing, ensuring dependencies, retries, and SLAs are handled without manual intervention.

• Production Operations & Monitoring: Ensure the reliability and scalability of data pipelines; implement effective logging, tracing, and alerting. Establish monitoring for model performance, data drift, bias, and service health, paying particular attention to data quality across QMS data feeds, where low-frequency quality signals amplify the impact of anomalies.

AI & Agent Systems Support

• Workflow Support: Collaborate with data scientists and Quality stakeholders to explore how parts of complex quality workflows (e.g., audit preparation, deviation triage, CAPA trending) can be supported by AI-assisted or agent-based approaches, while keeping clear boundaries between automated execution and human data science judgment.

• Prompt & Instruction Design: Help design and maintain prompt and instruction patterns, including context and memory handling, that translate Quality analytics requirements into clear, well-scoped directives with defined acceptance criteria.

• Efficiency & Optimization: Where AI tooling is used, apply sensible practices to manage context usage and cost, balancing capability with available budget.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Cross-functional Partnership: Work closely with data scientists, Quality analysts, and stakeholders across R&D Quality programs (e.g., Audit, Deviation, CAPA, Risk Management, Escalation/Serious Breach). Provide frameworks, templates, and guardrails that accelerate analytics delivery.

• Testing & Validation: Demonstrate a strong focus on testing by setting up frameworks for both traditional ML models and AI-generated code. Design validation pipelines with automated quality gates, including type checking, linting, integration tests, and contract tests.

• Documentation & Release Management: Develop clear, detailed guides, operational playbooks, and user instructions. Coordinate releases with IT and the global team; maintain runbooks, rollback strategies, and change tickets.

• Security & Compliance: Apply security, access-control, and data-governance best practices across pipelines and infrastructure, ensuring solutions meet the expectations of a validated, GxP-regulated environment.

Innovation & Technical Strategy

• Technology Evaluation & Roadmap Input: Evaluate emerging ML, data, and AI tooling; prototype promising approaches and recommend adoption, contributing to the technical roadmap for next-generation Quality analytics and automation.

• Guardrails & Assurance: Define evaluation criteria, test sets, and guardrails for AI-assisted and agent-based components, ensuring outputs are accurate, traceable, and appropriate for a regulated Quality environment.

Tech Stack

Basic

• Programming & scripting: Python and SQL; scripting with Python, Bash, or PowerShell.

• Source control: Git and source control management.

• CI/CD & release management: Working knowledge of CI/CD tools and release management (e.g., GitHub Actions).

• Cloud platforms: Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS or Azure).

• Containers: Container technologies (Docker; Kubernetes).

• Data & ML platform: Databricks.

• Core ML understanding: Understanding of model evaluation and scoring, including avoidance of model bias.

Preferred

• Cloud infrastructure / infrastructure-as-code: Terraform; broader cloud engineering experience (AWS preferred).

• AI/ML packages: Experience with common AI/ML libraries such as scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and XGBoost.

• Monitoring & logging: Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, or Prometheus.

• Infrastructure concepts: Understanding of networking, security, and infrastructure fundamentals.

Basic Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree and Eight Years' Experience

OR

Masters' Degree and Six Years' Experience

OR

PhD / PharmD

Preferred Qualifications:

• Degree in computer science, computer engineering, information systems, or a related discipline with relevant experience in ML engineering, data engineering, or ML operations

• Significant hands-on experience operationalizing data/ML solutions end-to-end, including data engineering, pipeline development, deployment, and production monitoring.

• Strong prog]]>