Senior AI Engineer

About AstraZeneca

At AstraZeneca, we put patients first and strive to meet their unmet needs worldwide. Working here means being entrepreneurial, thinking big and working together to make the impossible a reality. If you are swift to action, confident to lead, willing to collaborate, and curious about what science can do, then you’re our kind of person.

Beijing Site info

The Beijing AI Center is a new strategic investment by AstraZeneca to accelerate drug discovery through AI. The center brings together AI researchers, computational scientists, and platform engineers to apply foundation models, agentic AI, and large-scale scientific computing to real R&D problems. Situated in one of the world's most dynamic AI talent markets, the center operates at the intersection of AI and biologics discovery, computational chemistry, and data-driven drug development.

The center is structured around three pillars: Discovery verticals (biologics engineering, computational chemistry) that own the science, Data & AI Platforms (this role) that own the capabilities, and R&D IT that owns the infrastructure. A dedicated on-premises GPU cluster provides the compute backbone, operated by IT and shaped by platform standards.

About the Beijing AI Centre

The Beijing AI Center is a new strategic investment by AstraZeneca to accelerate drug discovery through AI. The center brings together AI researchers, computational scientists, and platform engineers to apply foundation models, agentic AI, and large-scale scientific computing to real R&D problems. Situated in one of the world's most dynamic AI talent markets, the center operates at the intersection of AI and biologics discovery, computational chemistry, and data-driven drug development.

The center is structured around three pillars: Discovery verticals (biologics engineering, computational chemistry), Data & AI Platforms (this role), and ecosystem partnerships with leading Chinese academic institutions and AI companies. A dedicated on-premises GPU cluster provides the compute backbone for training and inference workloads, supported by both cloud and local infrastructure.

About the Role

AstraZeneca's Beijing AI Center brings together Discovery science, AI platforms, and infrastructure to accelerate drug discovery through artificial intelligence. The Senior AI Engineer is the first AISI platform hire in Beijing, responsible for making the center's GPU investment productive for science teams.

You will design and deliver the distributed training infrastructure, AI engineering standards, and compute orchestration policies that enable Discovery AI scientists to train foundation models, run fine-tuning experiments, and scale inference workloads. You are the bridge between IT's hardware infrastructure and Discovery's scientific workloads.

This role sits in AISI's AI Centre of Excellence, a horizontal capability team that serves all Discovery verticals (Biologics Engineering, Computational Chemistry, Safety) in Beijing. You set the AI engineering standards. Discovery teams bring the science. IT provisions the infrastructure. You make it all work together.

What You’ll Do

Distributed Training (First 90 Days)

• Design and validate multi-node multi-GPU training templates (DDP, FSDP) for NVIDIA H20 GPUs
• Build operational runbooks covering common failure modes, checkpointing, recovery
• Establish baseline performance benchmarks (throughput, step time, scaling efficiency)
• Optimize data loading pipelines to eliminate I/O bottlenecks in distributed settings

AI Engineering Standards

• Define training method standards: naming conventions, experiment configuration, model registry requirements, reproducibility criteria
• Create scheduling policies: GPU quota rules, priority tiers, job templates for the center's Kubernetes/Run:AI platform
• Establish compute triage process: how science teams request and receive GPU allocation
• MLOps: experiment tracking, model registry, CI/CD for ML, Kubernetes
• Streamlining non-AI pipeline and workflow dependencies

Fine-tuning and Optimization

• Build reusable fine-tuning pipeline templates for protein language models and scientific AI workloads
• Optimize training code for H20 GPU to boost efficiency and throughput
• Collaborate with NVIDIA on hardware-specific optimizations

Cross-Organizational Coordination

• Translate Discovery team workload needs into infrastructure requirements for IT
• Operate as "business owner" for AI compute, while IT operates as "system owner"
• Participate in weekly coordination meetings across Discovery, AISI, and IT

What You Bring

Required

• 5+ years of experience in distributed deep learning training (DDP, FSDP, DeepSpeed, or equivalent)
• Strong PyTorch expertise with production-grade model training
• Experience with GPU workload optimization and multi-node cluster management
• Kubernetes job scheduling experience (Kubeflow, Slurm, Run:AI, or equivalent)
• Experience setting AI/ML engineering standards for teams (not just personal projects)
• Hands-on experience improving Tranformer-based models (ex: FlashAttention or related optimizations)
• Ability to work full-time in Beijing

Preferred

• Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (QLoRA, LoRA, adapters)
• Reinforcement learning training infrastructure
• AWS China or Alibaba Cloud experience
• NVIDIA H20 or H100-series GPU familiarity

Desirable

• Biopharma domain knowledge (molecular simulation, protein folding, drug discovery)
• Experience working across organizational boundaries (e.g., AI platform team serving multiple science groups)

Why AstraZeneca?

At AstraZeneca we’re dedicated to being a Great Place to Work. Where you are empowered to push the boundaries of science and unleash your entrepreneurial spirit. There’s no better place to make a difference to medicine, patients and society. An inclusive culture that champions diversity and collaboration, and always committed to lifelong learning, growth and development. We’re on an exciting journey to pioneer the future of healthcare.

So, what’s next?

Are you already imagining yourself joining our team? Good, because we can’t wait to hear from you!

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.