Director of AI
Remote
Director of AI Engineering
Vertex Pharmaceuticals · Biopharmaceuticals · 5000+ employees · 📍 Boston, MA
Build and own the foundational intelligence layer—memory, personas, skills, and flagship agents—that all enterprise AI agents at a pharma company mid-AI-transformation are built on top of.
AI Maturity
scaling
Why Role Exists
Transformation
Company Stage
public
Source
linkedin
Key Responsibilities
- Design and operate the agent memory layer covering personal (per-user/session) and organizational (shared institutional) memory with retention, retrieval, and conflict resolution policies
- Define and steward the persona-as-code system governing agent voice, remit, versioning, and deployment workflows
- Curate the skills catalog of atomic tools and higher-order compositions with contracts, registry, and quality standards
- Build and deploy flagship AI agents for high-value enterprise use cases using Snowflake Cortex AI, Databricks AI, and orchestration frameworks
- Define and enforce enterprise-wide agent orchestration standards, prompt libraries, tool-use patterns, and response quality bars
- Own conversational UX standards across tone, citation, error handling, escalation, and transparency
- Govern reusable prompt and skill asset library with documentation and contribution workflows
Requirements
- 10+ years of AI/ML engineering experience with demonstrated engineering leadership
- Hands-on experience designing agentic AI systems including memory, persona, and tool orchestration layers
- Experience with enterprise agent orchestration frameworks and LLM-based systems
- Ability to define and enforce cross-team technical standards at enterprise scale
Signals
- ⚠ No salary range disclosed
- ⚠ Team size not specified — unclear whether this is a build-from-scratch hire or inheriting a team
- ⚠ Reports-to structure not mentioned, leaving organizational authority unclear
- ⚠ Job description appears truncated mid-sentence in requirements section
- ✓ Clear platform-level mandate — not a single product but foundational infrastructure for all agents company-wide
- ✓ Specific and sophisticated technical scope (memory architecture, personas-as-code, skills catalog) signals mature AI thinking
- ✓ Named enterprise platforms (Snowflake Cortex AI, Databricks AI) confirm real tooling investment
- ✓ Role is embedded in a dedicated AI team within a well-resourced public pharma company
- ✓ AI-first transformation framing suggests executive-level buy-in and strategic urgency
Company History
This exact role was posted on 2026-05-30 and is reappearing now — this is at minimum the second posting in a short window, suggesting either the first round of candidates did not yield a hire or the role was recently vacated shortly after being filled, warranting caution.