Agentic Applications Expert - AI and Machine Learning for Drug Discovery

Agentic Applications Expert, Rapid Prototyping

Job Description Summary

Novartis has embraced a bold strategy to drive a company-wide digital transformation. Our objective is to position Novartis as an industry leader by proactively adopting digital technologies that foster innovative approaches to hasten drug discovery and development. By utilizing both internal and external R&D data with the power of data science, predictive models, generative AI, and machine learning, our objective is to identify new targets, create more effective therapeutic molecules, better predict drug pharmacokinetics and safety risks, refine clinical trial design, and significantly shorten development cycles. The Artificial Intelligence and Computational Sciences (AICS) team leads Biomedical Research (BR) in exploring and applying advanced AI and ML methodologies to generate novel drug discovery insights, and to speed and improve drug discovery efficiency whilst focusing on patients’ needs.


AICS partners with drug discovery teams, raises the level of AI expertise across BR and ensures that BR science keeps up with the rapidly evolving ecosystem of AI technologies by connecting with AI leaders in academia and industry.


This role supports the work to create and deploy Agentic Systems throughout BR in collaboration with the AICS and RX teams, BRs data science community and key stakeholders.

Job Description

Responsibilities:

Agentic Systems:

• Build, implement, and deploy a cutting-edge and impactful portfolio of Agentic applications with BR drug discovery project teams and drug discovery platforms

• Raise the level of Agentic expertise & capabilities across BR

• Help position AI-aided drug discovery contributions to deliver and support progress of BR’s portfolio, enable new kinds of therapeutic discoveries, shorten cycle times, and increase efficiency.

Collaboration & partnership

• Regularly communicate, engage, align with AICS teams, the broader data science community, and senior scientists.

• Initiate and lead key high-value internal collaborations across BR.

• Help to identify, recommend, and evaluate opportunities for Agentic collaborations across BR · Provide subject matter expertise, input, and evangelism to the field of AI across BR.

What you’ll bring to the role:

• 4+ years of significant experience in innovation, development, deployment and continuous support of Machine Learning tools and models, including experience in an enterprise environment.

• 2+ years of hands-on experience fine-tuning and prompting large language models (SFT, LoRA, RLHF, ORPO, GRPO, etc.). Experience with pretraining and post-training a plus.

• 2+ year of hands-on experience and knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-use agents (e.g. e34wReAct style systems), and orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, etc.).

• Strong understanding and experience using version control systems for developing software (e.g. GitHub, git, subversion, bitbucket, etc.).

• Proficiency in Python and experienced with automated testing, code review, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.).

• Entrepreneurial spirit with can-do, pro-active attitude which compliments your deep passion for understanding emerging technologies with pragmatic insight into where those technologies can be integrated into business solutions to meet stakeholder requirements.

Nice to have:

• Expertise in bringing advanced analytics insights and actions to a large Research organization & deep understanding of Drug development.

• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions that demonstrate innovation agent frameworks or computational drug discovery a plus.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion:

We are committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams representative of the patients and communities we serve.

Benefits and rewards:

Read our handbook to learn about all the ways we’ll help you thrive personally and professionally:

https://www.novartis.com/careers/benefits-rewards

For Basel, Switzerland:

Switzerland Accessibility and accommodation Novartis is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to all individuals. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, or in order to receive more detailed information about the essential functions of a position, please send an e-mail to diversity.inclusion_ch@novartis.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Please include the job requisition number in your message. 

Skills Desired

Apache Hadoop, Applied Mathematics, Big Data, Curious Mindset, Data Governance, Data Literacy, Data Management, Data Quality, Data Science, Data Strategy, Data Visualization, Deep Learning, Machine Learning (ML), Machine Learning Algorithms, Master Data Management, Proteomics, Python (Programming Language), R (Programming Language), Statistical Modeling

Experience Level

Senior Level