Senior Principal AI Engineer

Location: Boston, MA; hybrid role

Salary: $188,000–$282,000 base salary per year, plus eligibility for an annual bonus and annual equity awards.

Company

Vertex is a global biotechnology company focused on scientific innovation and solutions that improve outcomes for patients.

What you will do

• Define the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for an enterprise agentic AI platform.
• Build reusable platform services for RAG pipelines, knowledge retrieval, prompt workflows, tool use, and agent orchestration.
• Own the centralized AI Gateway, Control Plane, and Control Tower for model access, routing, governance, monitoring, and operational oversight.
• Implement guardrails, security, privacy, policy enforcement, auditability, telemetry, and reliability controls across AI solutions.
• Establish agent deployment, versioning, evaluation, observability, and continuous improvement frameworks.
• Partner with product, engineering, data, security, and UX teams while mentoring engineers and influencing enterprise technical standards.

Requirements

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience designing enterprise-grade AI/ML platforms and distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in agentic AI architectures, LLM applications, platform engineering, RAG, vector search, and document retrieval.
• Experience with orchestration frameworks, workflow engines, multi-step agent execution, evaluation systems, and centralized monitoring or governance platforms.
• Experience defining architecture, standards, and reusable services for large-scale enterprise environments, including AI-assisted software development and autonomous coding agents.
• Strong communication, leadership, problem-solving, and hands-on technical execution skills.

Nice to have

• Experience building AI platforms in regulated or highly governed environments.
• Knowledge of human-in-the-loop workflows, responsible AI, policy engines, guardrails, and audit frameworks.
• Experience with ML infrastructure, model serving, cloud-native architectures, DevOps, and MLOps.
• Experience leading technical teams through platform transformation initiatives.

Culture & Benefits

• Continuous learning and support for staying current with AI, technology, automation, and industry trends.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits, generous paid time off, and summer and winter company shutdowns.
• Educational assistance programs, including student loan repayment.
• Commuting subsidy, matching charitable donations, and 401(k).
• Equal employment opportunity and reasonable workplace accommodations.