Director, Generative AI

Role Summary

Director, Generative AI based at the ShinrAI Center for AI/ML at Takeda, Cambridge, MA. We seek individuals with deep knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with extensive experience in Generative AI, to advance AI applications in developing innovative medicine for patients. The role involves partnering across functions, guiding solution design, and driving governance and ethics in AI/ML applications.

Responsibilities

• Partner with data science teams, domain experts, and business units to identify and prioritize opportunities to leverage machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI to drive decision making and automation across R&D.
• Translate business needs into clearly scoped ML projects and steer solution design and implementation.
• Educate and enable the application of ML and generative AI in pharmaceutical R&D operations and scientific domains.
• Identify, monitor, and validate external AI/ML developments; cultivate relationships with external experts and partners; report and present emerging developments to shape innovation and governance.
• Build relationships across the company to inform work and contribute to collaborations, including writing insightful, actionable pieces for decision makers.
• Be a leading voice for building common capability and adopting best practices.
• Work with Ethics and Governance teams to ensure ethical AI/ML applications with broad patient and business benefits.
• Mentor AI/ML engineers and data scientists to grow professionally.
• Measure, document, and communicate impacts of the Center‚Äôs efforts.

Qualifications

• Track record of cross-functional partnership to develop and deploy novel data solutions in production.
• Ability to communicate complex technical topics to diverse audiences; translate big-picture ideas into micro use cases.
• Experience recognizing and communicating implications of emerging technologies.
• Excellent communication, prioritization, and interpersonal skills with high attention to detail.
• Advanced degree (M.S., PhD) in mathematics, applied statistics, computer science, machine learning, or similar, with 8+ years of experience architecting and deploying end-to-end ML systems at scale; experience with agentic and LLM-based solutions; fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific applications; transfer learning from small datasets; expertise in multiple AI/ML domains (e.g., computer vision, NLP, etc.).
• Solid understanding of deep learning architectures and traditional ML models, ML Ops, and DevOps practices; experience delivering custom software solutions for complex R&D needs; proficiency with coding environments and standard software engineering workflows.
• Enthusiasm to learn and ask questions; entrepreneurial experience desirable; experience in life sciences/healthcare is a plus.

Skills

• Cross-functional collaboration
• Strategic thinking and governance in AI/ML
• Communication and stakeholder management
• Hands-on ML engineering and experimentation
• ML model development, deployment, and monitoring
• Ethical and compliant AI practices

Education

• Advanced degree (M.S., PhD) in mathematics, applied statistics, computer science, machine learning, or similar.

Additional Requirements

• Location: Boston, MA area (as per posting).
• Travel: Not specified in source.