Lead Data Scientist

Lead Data Scientist -Research & Development / Data Science

Location: London UK (officebased projects across US & EU)

Join Clinical AI to build productionready LLM and GenAI solutions that accelerate drug development and improve patient care across global R&D.

Your new role
As a Lead Data Scientist in Clinical AI you will design develop and deploy LLMbased and ML solutions for content retrieval generation summarization and inference to support crossfunctional healthcare and drugdevelopment challenges. You will bridge data science and software engineering-architecting services designing APIs building backend systems and integrating models while ensuring performance safety privacy and regulatory compliance.

Daytoday your tasks will include:

• Design and develop productionready LLM/GenAI solutions for retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) summarization and inference to address clinical and R&D use cases.
• Build and integrate backend services APIs and data pipelines (embeddings vector DBs knowledge bases) and support endtoend deployment using cloud platforms and containerization.
• Finetune and evaluate models (supervised LoRA/PEFT prompt engineering) implement monitoring and testing frameworks for performance fairness hallucination rate latency and cost.
• Optimize models and systems (quantization distillation caching) and operationalise with LLMOps tools and CI/CD best practices for stable secure production use.
• Ensure compliance with internal/external AI governance data protection and regulatory requirements (anonymization access controls audit logging) and produce technical documentation and runbooks
• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders across Data Science Engineering Medical and Regulatory teams to align on solutions publish outcomes and drive technology roadmap adoption.
• Stay current on LLM research trendsbestpracticesand technology roadmapand pursue publications through R&D relevant activities.

Your new department
You will join the Clinical AI & Analytics team in R&D working across the Target Discovery Clinical Development and Medical functions. Our team blends advanced machine learning research with production engineering to create trustworthy AI systems that support discovery development and patientfacing insights.

Your skills & qualifications
To succeed in this role you should:

• Hold a PhD Masters or Bachelors degree in Computer Science Computer Engineering Computational Biology Engineering or a related quantitative discipline (PhD preferred).
• Have strong practical experience in LLMs / generative AI: model selection finetuning (LoRA PEFT) prompt engineering evaluation and observability.
• Possess software engineering experience from architecture design to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with handson experience in cloud platforms containers and microservices and automating serverless event-driven pipelines in cloud platforms.
• Be experienced building data pipelines and retrieval systems (embeddings vector DBs knowledge bases) to support RAG and document understanding.
• Demonstrate competence implementing testing monitoring and optimisation for model performance fairness and cost; familiar with LLMOps tools (e.g. LangChain LlamaIndex Langfuse) is advantageous.
• Have excellent collaboration and communication skills to work with crossfunctional teams translate technical concepts for stakeholders and ensure regulatory and privacy requirements (GDPR) are met.

Furthermore you have experience with implementing CI/CD best practices including API development MCP implementation cloud-based distributed systems containerization integration test automation and monitoring particularly in stateful LLM system designs. Strong publications record in applied LLM/ML research areas is also a requirement.

Working at Novo Nordisk
Every day we seek the solutions that defeat serious chronic Clinical AI youll work at the interface of research and engineering contributing to solutions that can materially improve drug development and patient outcomes. Youll join a collaborative environment that values scientific rigour continuous learning and responsible innovation.

Deadline 8 May. We look forward to receiving your application.

We commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants.

At Novo Nordisk were not chasing quick fixes were creating lasting change for long-term health. For over 100 years weve been driven by a single purpose: to defeat serious chronic diseases and help millions of people live healthier lives. This dedication fuels our constant curiosity and inspires us to push the boundaries of whats possible in healthcare. We embrace diverse perspectives seek out bold ideas and build partnerships rooted in shared purpose. Together were making healthcare more accessible treating and preventing diseases and pioneering solutions that create change spanning generations. When you join us you become part of something bigger a legacy of impact that reaches far beyond today.