Principal Scientist, AI Remote (United States)

Principal Scientist AI - Remote (United States)

Remote (United States) Up to 10% travel for client workshops and team onsite sessions Full-time exempt

Join Our Team at Rancho BioSciences!

As we continue to grow Rancho BioSciences is seeking a Principal Scientist to define and deliver AI-enabled data products and solutions that transform how our clients generate insights across discovery development and real-world evidence (RWE). This role is a hands-on technical leadership position for someone who can shape use cases architect solutions build prototypes and guide production deployments-while serving as a trusted advisor to clients and a mentor to internal teams.

Who We Are

Rancho BioSciences is a San Diego-based provider of biomedical data curation and data science services for pharma and biotech spanning drug discovery through translational research. Our teams of scientists data engineers and software experts deliver end-to-end solutions across data curation management mining and analysis to help customers accelerate R&D. We partner long-term with blue-chip clients and emerging biotechs bringing scientific rigor quality and a customer-first mindset to every engagement.

What Youll Do

• Partner with clients to identify high-value AI/ML and GenAI use cases; lead discovery workshops and author clear requirements system designs and reference architectures. Lead the design and delivery of end-to-end solutions: data ingestion and governance feature engineering model development LLM/RAG pipelines evaluation deployment and lifecycle management. Help maintain best practices for safe effective GenAI: prompt strategies retrieval design vector stores guardrails bias/toxicity checks privacy/PII handling and human-in-the-loop review. Build internal accelerators and reusable assets: ontologies/knowledge graphs data models feature stores evaluation tools and workflow templates that improve delivery speed and quality. Guide build-buy-partner decisions; evaluate vendors and open-source components; create objective comparison criteria and recommendations. Collaborate with Sales/Account Management on pre-sales: scope use cases design pilots/POCs estimate level of effort and contribute to statements of work. Provide scientific and technical leadership to project teams; mentor early-career scientists and engineers; model Ranchos values of scientific rigor humility and customer focus. Proactively identify opportunities to apply emerging AI/ML capabilities to client challenges and internal processes evaluating new approaches with a critical eye toward measurable value. Stay current with the rapidly evolving AI/ML landscape: monitor research evaluate new tools and frameworks and translate relevant advances into actionable recommendations for clients and delivery teams. Contribute to Ranchos thought leadership through papers talks and client education.

What Were Looking For

Must-Haves:

• PhD in Computational Biology Bioinformatics Computer Science Statistics or related field (or comparable demonstrated relevant experience). 5 years delivering ML/AI solutions in life sciences (discovery translational clinical or RWE) including 3 years leading cross-functional technical teams. Hands-on expertise with Python and core ML/DL frameworks (PyTorch and/or TensorFlow; Keras); strong software engineering practices (testing code review version control). Proven experience building production-grade data and deployment pipelines: SQL and Spark containerization (Docker) orchestration (Airflow/Prefect) cloud services (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP welcome). Experience with multi-agent systems and agent orchestration in production use cases. Track record of rigorous LLM evaluation: designing task-specific benchmarks implementing automated evaluation frameworks diagnosing failure modes and iteratively optimizing retrieval and generation pipelines for accuracy latency and cost. Practical GenAI/LLM experience: retrieval-augmented generation vector databases (e.g. FAISS Milvus pgvector) prompt engineering evaluation frameworks and safety/guardrail techniques. Strong client-facing skills: translating scientific needs into technical solutions presenting to senior stakeholders and contributing to scope and SOWs. Domain fluency with clinical preclinical or RWE data and relevant standards (CDISC OMOP FHIR) and biomedical ontologies (e.g. OBO SNOMED MeSH).

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience with knowledge graphs (RDF/OWL SPARQL Neo4j) and entity/relationship modeling. Biomedical NLP (e.g. BioBERT SciBERT) and ontology-driven text mining. Privacy and compliance expertise: de-identification data use agreements and audit readiness. Familiarity with data product thinking and monetization of curated datasets. Familiarity with multimodal foundation models in biomedical domains: single-cell embeddings (e.g. scGPT Geneformer) molecular/chemical LLMs (e.g. ChemBERTa MolBERT) or medical imaging models (e.g. BiomedCLIP pathology foundation models). MLOps proficiency with platforms such as AWS SageMaker Vertex AI or Kubeflow; experiment tracking (MLflow/Weights & Biases); model registry and monitoring.

Why Youll Love Working at Rancho BioSciences:

• Great opportunities to grow and develop with the company as we scale Competitive base salary Fully Remote environment - work from anywhere! Flexible work arrangements Great company swag Private medical coverage and/or personal stipend to ensure you and your familys wellbeing Participation in country-specific financial empowerment programs (401k Pension/Retirement FSA/HSA etc.)

More About Us:

• Learn more about our culture: Follow us on LinkedIn: Explore additional career opportunities: BioSciences is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability veteran status or any other protected status under applicable laws.
  

  Required Experience:

  Staff IC