Senior Principal AI Engineer
Vertex Pharmaceuticals2 hours ago
Boston, MA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$188k - $282k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and standards for Vertex’s enterprise agentic AI platform.
- Design and build reusable platform services for model integration, RAG, knowledge retrieval, prompt workflows, tool use, and agent orchestration.
- Own the centralized AI Gateway, Control Plane, and Control Tower, including model routing, provider abstraction, fallback, rate limiting, governance, monitoring, and operational controls.
- Develop agent lifecycle, deployment, versioning, evaluation, observability, reliability, and continuous-improvement frameworks.
- Implement guardrails for content safety, prompt-injection defense, data-loss prevention, sensitive-data handling, responsible AI, identity, access, privacy, and compliance.
- Build AI FinOps capabilities for token visibility, budgeting, chargeback/showback, cost allocation, forecasting, and model-cost optimization.
- Establish telemetry, audit trails, quality monitoring, incident response, risk reporting, and executive-level transparency across AI systems.
- Partner with product, engineering, data, security, and UX teams; mentor engineers; influence technical direction; and evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and vendors.
Requirements
- Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 10+ years of experience designing and building enterprise-grade AI/ML platforms and distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in agentic AI architectures, LLM-based applications, platform engineering, RAG systems, vector search, document retrieval, and knowledge integration.
- Strong experience with AI orchestration frameworks, workflow engines, multi-step agent execution, centralized monitoring platforms, governance, observability, and control systems.
- Experience with AI-assisted software development and autonomous coding agents, including establishing responsible-use standards and governance for engineering teams.
- Experience defining architecture, standards, reusable services, APIs, service contracts, and platform patterns for large-scale enterprise environments.
- Strong understanding of AI evaluation, quality measurement, performance optimization, scalability, reliability, security, and enterprise controls.
- Experience influencing cross-functional stakeholders and technical direction, with strong communication, leadership, problem-solving, and hands-on execution skills.
- Preferred qualifications include experience in regulated or highly governed environments, human-in-the-loop and responsible AI practices, policy engines, guardrails, audit frameworks, ML infrastructure, model serving, production AI operations, cloud-native architectures, DevOps/MLOps, and platform transformation initiatives.
Benefits
- Base salary range is $188,000-$282,000, with eligibility for annual bonus and annual equity awards.
- Benefits include medical, dental, vision, generous paid time off, week-long summer and winter company shutdowns, educational assistance including student loan repayment, commuting subsidy, charitable donation matching, and 401(k).
- The position is hybrid, as indicated by the #LI-HYBRID designation.