Senior Manager, Machine Learning Platform Engineer

At Gilead, we’re creating a healthier world for all people. For more than 35 years, we’ve tackled diseases such as HIV, viral hepatitis, COVID-19 and cancer – working relentlessly to develop therapies that help improve lives and to ensure access to these therapies across the globe. We continue to fight against the world’s biggest health challenges, and our mission requires collaboration, determination and a relentless drive to make a difference.

Every member of Gilead’s team plays a critical role in the discovery and development of life-changing scientific innovations. Our employees are our greatest asset as we work to achieve our bold ambitions, and we’re looking for the next wave of passionate and ambitious people ready to make a direct impact.

We believe every employee deserves a great leader. People Leaders are the cornerstone to the employee experience at Gilead and Kite. As a people leader now or in the future, you are the key driver in evolving our culture and creating an environment where every employee feels included, developed and empowered to fulfil their aspirations. Join Gilead and help create possible, together.

Job Description

Job Description

This ML Platform Engineer will have the unique opportunity to apply cutting-edge data and AI technologies to one of the most meaningful challenges in healthcare: ensuring the quality of medicines that improve and save lives. As a pivotal member of R&D Quality, this role will help transform how quality insights are generated, scaled, and acted upon across Gilead’s drug development and clinical research programs. Through the operationalization of machine learning models, data pipelines, and advanced analytics platforms, the successful candidate will enable more proactive quality oversight, smarter decision-making, and continuous improvement, ultimately supporting Gilead’s mission to deliver life-changing therapies to patients worldwide.

The ML Platform Engineer will partner with the Quality Analytics & Insights team, a small, high-impact group responsible for advancing data science, analytics, and AI capabilities across R&D Quality. This role will build and maintain the ML and data infrastructure that supports Quality Performance and Quality Health models focused on signal detection, risk analytics, early identification of emerging issues, mitigation strategies, and continuous improvement. Working closely with data scientists, the engineer will operationalize models through robust data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, automation, and MLOps practices, transforming analytical prototypes into scalable, production-ready solutions. The role will collaborate directly with Quality teams, IT, and global delivery teams to support key Quality System elements and programs, including Audit, Deviation, CAPA, Risk Management, Escalation/Serious Breach, and Quality Analytics/Data Science, while helping define the technology roadmap for next-generation analytics, automation, and AI capabilities across the organization.

Primary Responsibilities

ML & Data Engineering

• Technical Ownership: Operate as a self-directed contributor who scopes, plans, and drives initiatives end-to-end — translating ambiguous Quality problems into technical solutions, making sound architectural trade-offs, and delivering production outcomes with minimal oversight.

• Infrastructure & Environment Automation: Independently provision and manage cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and containerization, standing up reproducible, scalable environments for training, serving, and experimentation with minimal reliance on external teams.

• Model Lifecycle Management: Develop and maintain pipelines to transition models from experimentation to production, including packaging, CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment. Support model serving for Quality use cases such as signal detection, risk analytics, and Quality Performance/Quality Health models.

• Data Pipeline Development: Design robust batch and streaming data workflows; integrate, define, and manage feature sets, lineage, and reuse across QMS data sources (e.g., Audit, Deviation, CAPA, Risk Management).

• Data Orchestration: Author and schedule reliable, observable workflows using orchestration tools and distributed processing, ensuring dependencies, retries, and SLAs are handled without manual intervention.

• Production Operations & Monitoring: Ensure the reliability and scalability of data pipelines; implement effective logging, tracing, and alerting. Establish monitoring for model performance, data drift, bias, and service health, paying particular attention to data quality across QMS data feeds, where low-frequency quality signals amplify the impact of anomalies.

AI & Agent Systems Support

• Workflow Support: Collaborate with data scientists and Quality stakeholders to explore how parts of complex quality workflows (e.g., audit preparation, deviation triage, CAPA trending) can be supported by AI-assisted or agent-based approaches, while keeping clear boundaries between automated execution and human data science judgment.

• Prompt & Instruction Design: Help design and maintain prompt and instruction patterns, including context and memory handling, that translate Quality analytics requirements into clear, well-scoped directives with defined acceptance criteria.

• Efficiency & Optimization: Where AI tooling is used, apply sensible practices to manage context usage and cost, balancing capability with available budget.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Cross-functional Partnership: Work closely with data scientists, Quality analysts, and stakeholders across R&D Quality programs (e.g., Audit, Deviation, CAPA, Risk Management, Escalation/Serious Breach). Provide frameworks, templates, and guardrails that accelerate analytics delivery.

• Testing & Validation: Demonstrate a strong focus on testing by setting up frameworks for both traditional ML models and AI-generated code. Design validation pipelines with automated quality gates, including type checking, linting, integration tests, and contract tests.

• Documentation & Release Management: Develop clear, detailed guides, operational playbooks, and user instructions. Coordinate releases with IT and the global team; maintain runbooks, rollback strategies, and change tickets.

• Security & Compliance: Apply security, access-control, and data-governance best practices across pipelines and infrastructure, ensuring solutions meet the expectations of a validated, GxP-regulated environment.

Innovation & Technical Strategy

• Technology Evaluation & Roadmap Input: Evaluate emerging ML, data, and AI tooling; prototype promising approaches and recommend adoption, contributing to the technical roadmap for next-generation Quality analytics and automation.

• Guardrails & Assurance: Define evaluation criteria, test sets, and guardrails for AI-assisted and agent-based components, ensuring outputs are accurate, traceable, and appropriate for a regulated Quality environment.

Tech Stack

Basic

• Programming & scripting: Python and SQL; scripting with Python, Bash, or PowerShell.

• Source control: Git and source control management.

• CI/CD & release management: Working knowledge of CI/CD tools and release management (e.g., GitHub Actions).

• Cloud platforms: Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS or Azure).

• Containers: Container technologies (Docker; Kubernetes).

• Data & ML platform: Databricks.

• Core ML understanding: Understanding of model evaluation and scoring, including avoidance of model bias.

Preferred

• Cloud infrastructure / infrastructure-as-code: Terraform; broader cloud engineering experience (AWS preferred).

• AI/ML packages: Experience with common AI/ML libraries such as scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and XGBoost.

• Monitoring & logging: Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, or Prometheus.

• Infrastructure concepts: Understanding of networking, security, and infrastructure fundamentals.

Basic Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree and Eight Years' Experience

OR

Masters' Degree and Six Years' Experience

OR

PhD / PharmD

Preferred Qualifications:

• Degree in computer science, computer engineering, information systems, or a related discipline with relevant experience in ML engineering, data engineering, or ML operations

• Significant hands-on experience operationalizing data/ML solutions end-to-end, including data engineering, pipeline development, deployment, and production monitoring.

• Strong programming skills in key languages such as Python, SQL, Go, and TypeScript, with proven ability to manipulate large and complex datasets using distributed computing technologies.

• Familiarity with AWS cloud services.

• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to present complex findings to both technical and non-technical audiences and a strong orientation toward teamwork in a fast-paced, regulated environment.

• Experience building, packaging, and maintaining machine learning models and libraries in production.

• Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud-based ML platforms.

• Proficiency with Databricks distributed processing (Spark), data orchestration, and similar data and BI technologies.

People Leader Accountabilities:

• Create Inclusion - knowing the business value of diverse teams, modeling inclusion, and embedding the value of diversity in the way they manage their teams.

• Develop Talent - understand the skills, experience, aspirations and potential of their employees and coach them on current performance and future potential. They ensure employees are receiving feedback and insight needed to grow, develop and realize their purpose.

• Empower Teams - connect the team to the organization by aligning goals, purpose, and organizational objectives, and holding them to account. They provide the support needed to remove barriers and connect their team to the broader ecosystem

The salary range for this position is: $157,590.00 - $203,940.00. Gilead considers a variety of factors when determining base compensation, including experience, qualifications, and geographic location. These considerations mean actual compensation will vary. This position may also be eligible for a discretionary annual bonus, discretionary stock-based long-term incentives (eligibility may vary based on role), paid time off, and a benefits package. Benefits include company-sponsored medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans*.

For additional benefits information, visit:

* Eligible employees may participate in benefit plans, subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable plans.

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Gilead Sciences Inc. is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment, and is dedicated to fostering an inclusive work environment comprised of diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. Employment decisions regarding recruitment and selection will be made without discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, genetic information or characteristic, gender identity and expression, veteran status, or other non-job related characteristics or other prohibited grounds specified in applicable federal, state and local laws. In order to ensure reasonable accommodation for individuals protected by Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Act of 1974, and Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, applicants who require accommodation in the job application process may contact [email protected] for assistance.

For more information about equal employment opportunity protections, please view the 'Know Your Rights' poster.

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