Sr Engineering Manager, Core GenAI Services
- Poland - Warsaw
- Italy - Rome
- Greece-Thessaloniki Chortiatis
- Italy - Milan
- France - Paris
- Germany - Berlin
ROLE SUMMARY
The SrEngineering Manager, Core GenAI Services, is a pivotal, senior technical leadership role reporting to the VP, R&D Technology Ecosystem. This role demands a unique combination of deep, hands-on architectural expertise, strategic vision, and people leadership, grounded in a proven ability to lead distributed engineering teams across diverse, complex technical landscapes.
You will drive the strategy, design, and operational execution for the organization's core internal GenAI capabilities, specifically owning the Core GenAI Services and the GenAI Gateway—a centralized API service that provides secure, standardized, and scalable access to GenAI models (LLMs, SLMs) and orchestration frameworks for internal teams across the R&D landscape.
Success in this position requires a leader with a proven track record of AI transformation, upskilling, and mentoring, capable of translating complex business needs in the pharmaceutical space into technical decisions that unlock massive scale and adoption. You will shape and continuously refine the internal engineering culture, championing principles of extreme ownership (“you build it, you own it”) and accelerating delivery through rapid feedback loops.
ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES
Senior Leadership & Strategy
Driving GenAI Strategy: Define and own the long-term vision and technical strategy for internal Core GenAI capabilities, ensuring alignment with enterprise AI goals and R&D business priorities.
AI Transformation & Upskilling: Lead the organizational AI transformation efforts, including upskilling and capability development across engineering and R&D teams.
Advanced Communication & Stakeholder Alignment: Leverage strong communication skills and experience interacting with senior customer and business stakeholders to drive consensus and adoption.
Standards & Best Practices: Drive standards, playbooks, and global best practices for LLMs, SLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), orchestration frameworks, and GenAI architectures, specifically tailored for the highly regulated pharmaceutical space.
Technical Leadership & Architecture (GenAI Gateway)
Core GenAI Ownership: Own the architecture and development of the Core GenAI Services and the high-performance, centralized GenAI Gateway, ensuring resilience, security, and low-latency API access for all consuming teams.
Deep GenAI Expertise: Provide hands-on architectural depth based on a deep understanding of GenAI technologies (LLMs, SLMs, RAG, AI agents, orchestration frameworks) and modern software/cloud architectures.
AI Productionization: Apply expertise in productionizing complex AI-based systems, leveraging experience from diverse domains including Computer Vision and Security applications, including robust evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and governance frameworks (MLOps).
Architectural Evolution: Own and evolve the platform architecture and technical strategy, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency across the cloud footprint.
People Leadership & Culture
Team Building: Build and lead a high-performing technical team of software engineers, machine learning engineers, and devops/infrastructure engineers.
Mentorship & Development: Actively mentor and develop our internal engineering talent pool, providing technical coaching that deepens expertise in AI/ML systems and platform engineering.
Cultural Definition: Define and evolve the internal engineering culture, championing extreme ownership, high quality, data-driven decision-making, and short, iterative feedback cycles.
Talent Growth: Lead, mentor, and grow teams of individual contributors and team leads, fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and structured career development.
Platform Engineering & Developer Enablement
Oversee the development of reusable SDKs, APIs, CLI tools, and developer platforms to maximize the adoption of GenAI capabilities.
Drive creation of reusable components, frameworks, and infrastructure that accelerate the full GenAI model lifecycle workflows.
Champion developer experience and platform adoption through high-quality documentation, enablement, and direct feedback loops with consuming teams.
QUALIFICATIONS
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
15+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with deep expertise in system architecture, platform development, and production AI/ML systems.
10+ years of progressive leadership and people management experience (including managing managers or sub-teams).
Demonstrated expertise in productionizing AI-based systems and scaling them for enterprise use across multiple, high-stakes domains (e.g., Computer Vision, Cybersecurity, GIS).
Expert-level production Python and extensive cloud (AWS) architecture experience designing complex, scalable GenAI systems.
Deep understanding of GenAI technologies (LLMs, SLMs, RAG, orchestration frameworks) and modern software/cloud architectures.
Proven stakeholder management, executive communication, and cross-functional delivery in complex, regulated environments.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or a related technical field.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Experience defining GenAI standards, playbooks, and best practices in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, or other highly regulated industries.
Track record of building and leading world-class, multi-disciplinary technical teams (SWEs, MLEs, DevOps).
Demonstrated expertise in fields directly applicable to R&D, such as Computer Vision, Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), or robust AI systems in a high-security context.
Experience with advanced LLM frameworks and services (e.g., Anthropic Claude, Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock) and orchestration tools (LangChain, LlamaIndex).
Advanced knowledge of AWS services, microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field.
Purpose
Breakthroughs that change patients' lives... At Pfizer we are a patient centric company, guided by our four values: courage, joy, equity and excellence. Our breakthrough culture lends itself to our dedication to transforming millions of lives.
Digital Transformation Strategy
One bold way we are achieving our purpose is through our company wide digital transformation strategy. We are leading the way in adopting new data, modelling and automated solutions to further digitize and accelerate drug discovery and development with the aim of enhancing health outcomes and the patient experience.
Flexibility
We aim to create a trusting, flexible workplace culture which encourages employees to achieve work life harmony, attracts talent and enables everyone to be their best working self. Let’s start the conversation!
Equal Employment Opportunity
We believe that a diverse and inclusive workforce is crucial to building a successful business. As an employer, Pfizer is committed to celebrating this, in all its forms – allowing for us to be as diverse as the patients and communities we serve. Together, we continue to build a culture that encourages, supports and empowers our employees.
Disability Inclusion
Our mission is unleashing the power of all our people and we are proud to be a disability inclusive employer, ensuring equal employment opportunities for all candidates. We encourage you to put your best self forward with the knowledge and trust that we will make any reasonable adjustments to support your application and future career. Your journey with Pfizer starts here!
Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives
Research confirms what intuition tells us: that purpose-driven companies perform better, are more innovative, attract and retain the best people, and know how to unleash the power of those people. Pfizer’s purpose—Breakthroughs that change patients' lives—fuels everything we do and reflects our passion for building on our legacy as one of the greatest contributors of good to the world.
Each word in our purpose has meaning and reflects the value we strive to bring to patients and society:
“Breakthroughs” - These are the innovations, scientific and commercial, that we seek to deliver every day. All colleagues, regardless of role, level or location, strive for breakthroughs every day.
“Change” - We want to do more than simply improve patients’ medical conditions; we want to dramatically change their lives for the better.
“Patients’ lives” - We consider not only patients, but everyone they touch—including their families, caregivers, and friends—and everything they love to do. It’s an intentionally holistic view.
Our purpose ensures that patients remain at the center of all we do. We live our purpose by sourcing the best science in the world; partnering with others in the healthcare system to improve access to our medicines; using digital technologies to enhance our drug discovery and development, as well as patient outcomes; and leading the conversation to advocate for pro-innovation/pro-patient policies.
Every decision we make and every action we take is done with the patient in mind—and to nurture an environment where breakthroughs can thrive.
Our Values
To fully realize Pfizer’s purpose, we have established a clear set of expectations regarding “what” we need to achieve for patients and “how” we will go about achieving those goals.
The “how” is represented by four simple, powerful values—courage, excellence, equity, and joy—that define our company and our culture.
Courage: Breakthroughs start by challenging convention, especially in the face of uncertainty or adversity. This happens when we think big, speak up, and are decisive.
Excellence: We can only change patients’ lives when we perform at our best together. This happens when we focus on what matters, agree who does what, and measure our outcomes.
Equity: We believe that every person deserves to be seen, heard, and cared for. This happens when we are inclusive, act with integrity, and reduce healthcare disparities.
Joy: We give ourselves to our work, but it also gives to us. We find joy when we take pride, recognize one another, and have fun.
Pfizer Digital
Pfizer Digital takes immense pride in being at the forefront of innovation, harnessing cutting-edge smart technology that profoundly impacts the lives of our patients.
With the transformative potential of digital solutions, we revolutionize how we discover, develop, and deliver medicines, enabling us to achieve breakthroughs faster and more efficiently.
By streamlining and automating transactional processes, we create valuable time and resources, empowering our talented team to focus on meaningful work that truly makes a difference in healthcare and beyond.
Benefits at Pfizer
Pfizer offers competitive compensation and benefits programs designed to meet the diverse needs of our colleagues. Our Pay for Performance Philosophy and Practices reward colleagues based on the contributions they make to our business.
Our Competitive Benefits Programs help our colleagues by:
- Promoting Health and Wellness to help colleagues maintain and improve their physical and mental wellbeing. Pfizer offerings include health and disability insurance, preventative health programs, medical screenings, free or reduced-cost vaccinations, discounts on Pfizer products, mental health support, nutrition and fitness counseling and more.
- Strengthening Colleagues’ Financial Security by providing company contributions to retirement plans, life insurance and financial planning education to help colleagues achieve their financial goals.
- Providing Benefits and Time off for the Moments that Matter to ensure Pfizer colleagues have the time away from the office to recharge, recover and return to work as the best version of themselves. Vacation, Holiday time and Sick time are just the beginning, with a 12 week parental leave policy for both parents of a new born, 10 day of caregiver leave for those times when your family needs you whether it’s a child, spouse or parent, bereavement leave, and additional country-specific programs.
- And so much more, depending on your country and site, Pfizer offers childcare facilities or discount programs, on-site health and/or fitness centers, movement and mindfulness solutions, “Log in for your Day” work flexibility and so much more.
For U.S. based jobs, view an overview of Pfizer’s U.S. benefits program (opens in a new window)