Senior Expert (AI Engineering)

Summary Job Title: Senior Expert (AI Engineering)

Location: Basel, Switzerland

Relocation Support: This role is based in Basel, Switzerland. Novartis is unable to offer relocation support: please only apply if accessible.

Imagine shaping how breakthrough medicines are discovered by bringing cutting-edge AI from concept to real-world application. As a Senior Expert in AI-Engineering, you will sit at the critical intersection of innovation and delivery—transforming advanced machine learning models into scalable, reliable solutions that accelerate drug discovery. Collaborating with leading scientists and AI experts, you will drive the translation of pioneering research into impactful tools, ensuring models are reproducible, efficient, and ready to solve complex biomedical challenges. This is an opportunity to directly influence how modern AI reshapes scientific discovery and improves patient outcomes.

About The Role Key Responsibilities

• Design and train advanced machine learning models for drug discovery, including deep learning and graph-based architectures
• Own end-to-end model lifecycle from problem definition to production deployment and continuous improvement
• Conduct rigorous benchmarking, validation, and performance evaluation against scientific and business objectives
• Deploy scalable, reliable model inference services meeting latency, throughput, and cost requirements
• Build automated training, retraining, and monitoring pipelines including model drift detection mechanisms
• Optimize models and pipelines for performance, reliability, and scalability across production environments
• Establish and promote engineering best practices for reproducibility, testing, and deployment standards
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate research innovations into production-ready AI solutions
• Partner with scientific experts to validate models against biological and chemical benchmarks
• Mentor teams and contribute to raising engineering excellence across the AI for Research organization

Essential Requirements

• Minimum four years of experience building, training, and deploying machine learning models with measurable real-world impact
• Deep proficiency in Python and frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX; expertise in model design and optimization
• Proven experience fine-tuning and deploying large pre-trained and foundation models including language and scientific models
• Strong understanding of model evaluation including benchmarking, cross-validation, and performance across data distributions
• Experience with distributed training and large-scale computing environments for high-performance model training
• Hands-on expertise optimizing models and pipelines for latency, throughput, cost, and production performance
• Experience with MLOps practices including experiment tracking, model versioning, reproducibility, and cloud deployment
• Strong problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills with ability to drive engineering excellence in complex environments

Rewards At Novartis, we’re committed to reimagining medicine together - and rewarding the people who make it happen.

The rewards of being part of our team go far beyond base pay and incentives. We also offer a variety of competitive benefits in kind to help you thrive personally and professionally, such as insurance plans, retirement plans, wellbeing resources and global recognition programs. In addition, we provide flexible and hybrid working options, where possible, and a minimum of 14 weeks paid parental leave.

Expected Annual Base Salary Range For Role Basel: Total Base Pay Range: 102,200.00 - 189,800.00 CHF Annual

The salary offered is determined based on gender-neutral objectives, such as relevant skills, competencies and experience in accordance with the Novartis pay setting policy and upon joining Novartis will be reviewed