Forward Deployed Engineer, China R&D IT
AstraZeneca4 days ago
Shanghai, ChinaSenior
Responsibilities
- Build working AI, data, and software proofs of concept within agreed two- to six-week time boxes.
- Define written success criteria with product owners, measure results, demonstrate POCs, and recommend whether to proceed, stop, or iterate.
- Work directly with scientists, clinical, regulatory, and laboratory staff to understand workflows and refine solutions from user feedback.
- Integrate vendor systems through APIs, data pipelines, and automation across AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and varied vendor technology stacks.
- Build LLM applications, retrieval and agent workflows, and classic machine learning prototypes while evaluating quality, cost, and failure modes.
- Explore and profile data, develop pipelines and data-quality checks, and identify access or quality issues before production.
- Prepare code, design notes, data findings, test results, risks, and open questions for each approved POC handover.
- Brief vendors, support the initial production build, and provide technical input on vendor scope, designs, and estimates.
- Follow approved architecture, cloud sandbox, data-protection, repository, documentation, and GxP separation requirements.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree or above in a STEM discipline such as computer science, engineering, data science, or life sciences.
- At least 6 years of hands-on software or data engineering experience with end-to-end working products or prototypes.
- Strong Python skills, SQL, and at least one of JavaScript, TypeScript, or Java.
- Experience with backend and API development, third-party and vendor-system integration, data pipelines, data modelling, data-quality checks, and messy source data.
- Enough front-end capability to provide users with a usable proof-of-concept interface.
- Experience building LLM applications such as retrieval-augmented generation or agent workflows beyond a demo, including model evaluation and failure analysis.
- Hands-on experience with AWS or Alibaba Cloud and working knowledge of the other, including their core compute, storage, database, serverless, container, and AI services.
- Understanding of AWS China region differences, China's Personal Information Protection Law, Data Security Law, Cybersecurity Law, and human genetic resources regulations.
- Clear written and spoken Mandarin and English, with the ability to explain technical findings and write actionable vendor handover documents.
- Preferred qualifications include a master's degree or PhD, regulated-industry experience, exposure to clinical/laboratory/regulatory/bioinformatics systems, prior forward deployed or solutions engineering experience, vendor handover experience, and experience with locally available Chinese language models and services.
Tech Stack
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.