AI Incubation Forward Deployment Engineer
AstraZeneca14 days ago
China (city not specified)Senior
Responsibilities
- Track, evaluate, benchmark, and recommend emerging AI technologies, frameworks, platforms, products, and China-specific LLM offerings.
- Engage directly with business functions to discover, assess, prioritize, and define success criteria for high-value AI use cases.
- Design and build AI proofs of concept, MVPs, agents, RAG assistants, intelligent document-processing solutions, and AI-enabled workflows.
- Design end-to-end AI architectures covering models, prompting, retrieval, tools, agents, enterprise data, APIs, and integrations.
- Deploy pilots, gather user and usage feedback, establish evaluation datasets and frameworks, and make evidence-based scale, pivot, or stop recommendations.
- Transition validated innovations to development teams with architecture, code, documentation, evaluation sets, and risk information.
- Guide productionization and engineering hardening, including performance, scalability, security, observability, and LLMOps.
- Build reusable AI components, templates, prompt libraries, agent tools, connectors, and reference architectures.
- Operate and optimize AI solutions through model and prompt versioning, monitoring, incident handling, and model upgrades.
- Apply AI to IT operations and promote AI coding assistants, development guardrails, and productivity measurement across engineering and support teams.
- Share knowledge through technical talks, workshops, playbooks, and team enablement.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree or above in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline; a master’s degree is preferred.
- At least 6 years of experience in software engineering, AI/ML, or solution architecture, including at least 2 years of hands-on generative AI or LLM application development.
- Strong hands-on Python software engineering skills; TypeScript or Java experience is a plus.
- Experience building and deploying applications, APIs, and cloud-native services on Azure, AWS, or China cloud platforms.
- Knowledge of generative AI, prompt and context engineering, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, fine-tuning, AI agents, multi-agent frameworks, MCP, and model evaluation.
- Practical knowledge of LLMOps/MLOps, AI observability and evaluation, AI security, enterprise integration, and AIOps tools.
- Proven experience taking AI innovations from 0 to 1 through enterprise PoCs, MVPs, and pilots with measurable business value.
- Experience in forward-deployed, solution engineering, or customer-facing technical roles working directly with business users.
- Experience transitioning prototypes into production-grade solutions and guiding development teams through architecture, handover, and technical delivery.
- Preferred experience in pharmaceutical, life sciences, regulated industries, GxP, CSV, data integrity, PIPL, or generative AI regulation.
- Experience with China and global AI ecosystems, innovation labs, startups, or AI incubation programs is desirable.
- Fluent English and Mandarin with strong written and verbal communication skills.
Benefits
- The role is based in AZ China and involves collaboration with global teams across time zones, business stakeholders, and external partners.
- The company states that it embraces diversity and equality of opportunity and complies with applicable non-discrimination, work authorization, and employment eligibility verification requirements.
Categories
Forward Deployed
About AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures, and commercializes prescription medicines for patients and healthcare systems. Its portfolio spans oncology, cardiovascular, renal and metabolism, respiratory and immunology, and rare diseases (expanded by the 2021 acquisition of Alexion). Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Cambridge, UK, it is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, generating revenue primarily from drug sales and partnerships.