Director, Agent Intelligence HYBRID ROLE

Job Description

This is a Hybrid position requiring 3 days a week in our Boston office

We are seeking an experienced AI engineering leader to build and operate Vertexs Agent Intelligence layer: the memory personas skills and flagship agent experiences that make every Vertex AI agent grounded consistent and effective. Vertex Pharmaceuticals is in a transformational period and the AI team is at the center of our AI-first strategy delivering solutions that empower executives researchers and business users to make faster more confident decisions.

As part of the Vertex Data team you will lead the Agent Intelligence function within Knowledge & Grounding. You will own the four primitives that all Vertex agents are built from: agent memory (personal and organizational) personas as code skills (atomic tools and higher-order compositions) and the flagship agents that put those primitives to work on Vertexs hardest use cases.

As the Director of Agent Intelligence you will build the reusable building blocks of agent intelligence at Vertex. Your work will multiply the velocity and quality of agent development across Vertex ensuring every agent benefits from a common foundation of grounded governed and reusable intelligence.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

• Agent Memory. Design and operate Vertexs agent memory layer spanning personal memory (per-user per-session continuity) and organizational memory (shared institutional knowledge agents accumulate and reuse) including retention retrieval conflict resolution and classification policies.

• Personas as Code. Define and steward the persona system that gives Vertex agents their voice remit and boundaries including versioning review composition and deployment workflows.

• Skills Catalog & Compositions. Curate the catalog of atomic tools agents can call (retrieval analytics action) and the higher-order skill compositions that combine them into persona-specific workflows with clear contracts registry and quality standards.

• Flagship Agent Development. Design build and deploy custom AI agents for Vertexs highest-value enterprise use cases using Snowflake Cortex AI Databricks AI and agent orchestration frameworks using these builds to harden the underlying primitives.

• Enterprise Agent Standards. Define and maintain the enterprise standards for agent orchestration prompt libraries persona definitions tool-use patterns and response quality that all teams must follow regardless of builder.

• Experience Consistency & UX Standards. Define the quality bar for conversational UX across the enterprise (tone/persona citation patterns error handling escalation paths transparency) and drive consistency across agents.

• Prompt & Skill Library Stewardship. Curate and govern reusable prompt and skill assets (system prompts persona templates tool instructions conversation patterns) with documentation and contribution workflows.

Knowledge and Skills:

• Proven Experience. 10 years of experience in data engineering AI/ML or advanced analytics with 3 years specifically focused on NLP systems AI agent development or conversational AI.

• AI Agent Expertise. Hands-on experience building production AI agents using frameworks like LangChain LangGraph or similar orchestration tools.

• Cloud AI Platforms. Strong experience with Snowflake (Cortex AI Cortex Analyst Cortex Search) and/or Databricks (Agent Bricks AI Functions Mosaic AI) in enterprise environments.

• Full-Stack AI Engineering. Ability to work across the full AI stack including data preparation prompt engineering agent orchestration evaluation/testing deployment and monitoring.

• Memory & State Design. Direct experience designing how agents remember including session state long-horizon memory retrieval over conversational history and the data model behind it.

• Production Operations. Track record of operating AI systems in production with high availability monitoring and continuous improvement.

• Leadership & Communication. Proven ability to lead technical teams communicate with executive stakeholders and translate business needs into AI solutions.

Preferred

• Pharma or Life Sciences Context. Experience in pharmaceutical biotech or life sciences data environments. Familiarity with clinical regulatory and commercial data domains is a plus.

• Platform Primitive Design. Experience designing reusable agent abstractions such as persona frameworks skill registries or tool catalogs.

• Agent Evaluation Tooling. Familiarity with evaluation tooling such as Braintrust LangSmith Mosaic AI Agent Evaluation Arize or Ragas.

• Model Customization. Experience with model fine-tuning distillation or post-training for domain adaptation.

Pay Range:

Disclosure Statement:

Flex Designation:

Flex Eligibility Status:

In this Remote-Eligible role you can choose to be designated as:
1. Remote: work remotely five days per week and come into the office on occasion youre always welcome on-site; or select
2. Hybrid: work remotely up to two days per week; or select
3. On-Site: work five days per week on-site with ad hoc flexibility.

Note: The Flex status for this position is subject to Vertexs Policy on Flex @ Vertex Program and may be changed at any time.

#LI-Remote

Company Information

Vertex is a global biotechnology company that invests in scientific innovation.

Vertex is committed to equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination for all employees and qualified applicants without regard to a persons race color sex gender identity or expression age religion national origin ancestry ethnicity disability veteran status genetic information sexual orientation marital status or any characteristic protected under applicable law. Vertex is an E-Verify Employer in the United States. Vertex will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities in accordance with applicable law.

Any applicant requiring an accommodation in connection with the hiring process and/or to perform the essential functions of the position for which the applicant has applied should make a request to the recruiter or hiring manager or contact Talent Acquisition at