Applied AI Architect Sr Director

Applied AI Architect Sr Director

Syneos Health® is a leading fully-integrated life sciences services organization built to accelerate customer success. We partner with innovators at every point across the drug development and commercialization continuum, helping them navigate complexity, anticipate change and accelerate progress.

Every day we perform better because of how we work together, as one team, each the best at what we do. We bring together talented experts across a broad spectrum of business critical corporate functions. Every role plays an essential part in enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our teams are agile, collaborative, and committed to delivering—for each other, for our customers, and ultimately for the people who rely on the services we support.
Discover what your 25,000 future colleagues already know:

Why Syneos Health
• We are passionate about developing our people, through career development and progression; supportive and engaged line management; technical and therapeutic area training; peer recognition and total rewards program.
• We are committed to building an inclusive culture – where you can authentically be yourself. Central to this is our purpose – Driven to Deliver – which captures the passion of our colleagues to show up each day and shape solutions that have the ability to dramatically impact someone’s life. 
• We are continuously building the company we all want to work for and our customers want to work with. Why? Because we know that when we bring together smart colleagues from across the world, we can shape the future of healthcare, driving impact for customers and defining the pace of patient progress.

Job Responsibilities

1. Applied AI Solution Architecture

- Own reference architecture for Applied AI and Product AI solutions across all three portfolios
- Design GenAI, RAG, knowledge engineering and Agentic AI solutions through to production
- Define model selection, prompt, context and grounding strategies per use case
- Set patterns for retrieval quality, vectorization and knowledge lifecycle
- Validate architecture hands-on with product engineering teams

2. Reusable AI Platform & Patterns

- Curate the catalog of reusable Applied AI building blocks
- Ensure solutions compose from approved services rather than duplicate capability
- Partner with Enterprise Data, Architecture and AI platform teams on delivery patterns
- Patterns: enterprise LLM services | RAG frameworks | knowledge engineering | orchestration | agentic workflows | evaluation and observability standards

3. AI-PDLC & Engineering Productivity

- Define standards, templates and skills that operationalize AI-PDLC across the SDLC
- Architect copilot and AI-assisted development workflows into the toolchain
- Set guardrails and quality gates for AI-generated code, tests and documentation
- Define productivity telemetry and value realization metrics

4. AI Governance & Cost Control

- Own the AI design review gate: architecture fit, risk and reuse before build
- Maintain AI governance standards with Data Governance, Security and Compliance
- Ensure teams use org-approved AI tools, models and enterprise endpoints
- Set evaluation, regression and drift detection standards for models and prompts
- Drive token metering, cached prompts and context optimization
- Meet regulated-industry privacy, auditability and validation requirements

5. Cross-Functional Technical Leadership

- Technical advisor to Development, QE and the Clinical, Commercial and Corporate leads
- Mentor engineers on AI design, prompt and context engineering, and evaluation
- Support build-versus-buy and platform decisions with clear trade-offs

Contribute to insourcing through capability mapping and skill definition

Get to know Syneos Health

Over the past 5 years, we have worked with 94% of all Novel FDA Approved Drugs, 95% of EMA Authorized Products and over 200 Studies across 73,000 Sites and 675,000+ Trial patients.

No matter what your role is, you’ll take the initiative and challenge the status quo with us in a highly competitive and ever-changing environment. Learn more about Syneos Health.

http://www.syneoshealth.com

Additional Information

Tasks, duties, and responsibilities as listed in this job description are not exhaustive.  The Company, at its sole discretion and with no prior notice, may assign other tasks, duties, and job responsibilities. Equivalent experience, skills, and/or education will also be considered so qualifications of incumbents may differ from those listed in the Job Description. The Company, at its sole discretion, will determine what constitutes as equivalent to the qualifications described above.   Further, nothing contained herein should be construed to create an employment contract.  Occasionally, required skills/experiences for jobs are expressed in brief terms. Any language contained herein is intended to fully comply with all obligations imposed by the legislation of each country in which it operates, including the implementation of the EU Equality Directive, in relation to the recruitment and employment of its employees.  The Company is committed to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including the provision of reasonable accommodations, when appropriate, to assist employees or applicants to perform the essential functions of the job.