Senior Expert - AI Engineering

About the role

Novartis is looking for a Senior Expert in AI Engineering in Hyderabad, India, on a hybrid basis with relocation support. The role sits at the intersection of innovation and delivery, turning advanced machine learning models into scalable, reliable solutions that accelerate drug discovery. You will work with leading scientists and AI experts to make models reproducible, efficient and ready to solve complex biomedical challenges.

Key responsibilities

• Design and train advanced machine learning models for drug discovery, including deep learning and graph-based architectures
• Own the end-to-end model lifecycle, from problem definition to production deployment and continuous improvement
• Benchmark, validate and evaluate models against scientific and business objectives
• Build scalable, reliable model inference services meeting latency, throughput and cost requirements
• Build automated training, retraining and monitoring pipelines, including model drift detection
• Optimize models and pipelines for performance, reliability and scalability in production
• Promote engineering best practices for reproducibility, testing and deployment
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and scientific experts to turn research into production-ready AI solutions
• Mentor teams and raise engineering excellence across the AI for Research organization

Required profile

• At least four years of experience building, training and deploying machine learning models with measurable real-world impact
• Proven experience fine-tuning and deploying large pre-trained and foundation models, including language and scientific models
• Understanding of model evaluation, benchmarking, cross-validation and performance across data distributions
• Experience with distributed training and large-scale computing environments
• Hands-on experience optimizing models and pipelines for latency, throughput, cost and production performance
• Experience with MLOps practices: experiment tracking, model versioning, reproducibility and cloud deployment
• Strong problem-solving, collaboration and communication skills

Required skills

• Deep proficiency in Python and frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX
• Machine learning, deep learning and graph algorithms
• Large pre-trained and foundation model fine-tuning
• MLOps and cloud deployment

What we offer

• Hybrid work arrangement
• Relocation support