Senior Principal AI Engineer

Location: Boston, MA; hybrid role

Salary: $188,000–$282,000 per year, plus annual bonus and equity awards.

Company

Vertex is a global biotechnology company focused on scientific innovation and improving outcomes for patients.

What you will do

• Architect and develop shared AI and agentic platform services for enterprise products and internal workflows.
• Build bring-your-own-agents frameworks, SDKs, templates, interfaces, and guardrails.
• Design agent lifecycle capabilities covering registration, configuration, testing, deployment, versioning, monitoring, and retirement.
• Develop model integrations, prompt and workflow orchestration, tool use, memory patterns, and agentic task coordination.
• Create evaluation, benchmarking, observability, tracing, logging, and alerting capabilities for AI workloads.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and partner with product, data, engineering, security, and architecture teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, or a related technical field; an advanced degree is preferred.
• Significant software engineering, machine learning engineering, or AI platform experience in senior or principal-level roles.
• Proven experience delivering production-scale AI or ML platforms and operationalizing generative AI or agent-based solutions.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, microservices, cloud-native applications, scalable backend engineering, and production reliability.
• Deep understanding of software engineering, AI-native engineering, testing, CI/CD, security, governance, and maintainability practices.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing architecture across cross-functional teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with enterprise AI or developer platforms, self-service onboarding, SDKs, CLIs, sandboxes, templates, and documentation.
• Familiarity with model gateways, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, vector databases, and knowledge retrieval systems.
• Experience with AI governance, responsible AI controls, compliance-oriented solutions, or regulated industries such as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, or life sciences.
• Strong mentoring and technical leadership experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Continuous learning and support for staying current with AI, technology, automation, and industry trends.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits with paid time off, including summer and winter company shutdowns.
• Educational assistance, student loan repayment support, commuting subsidy, charitable donation matching, and 401(k).
• Inclusive equal employment opportunity environment with reasonable accommodation support.