Senior Associate Engineer - AI Full Stack Developer

ZS is a place where passion changes lives. As a management consulting and technology firm focused on improving life and how we live it, we transform ideas into impact by bringing together data, science, technology and human ingenuity to deliver better outcomes for all. Here you’ll work side-by-side with a powerful collective of thinkers and experts shaping life-changing solutions for patients, caregivers and consumers, worldwide. ZSers drive impact by bringing a client-first mentality to each and every engagement. We partner collaboratively with our clients to develop custom solutions and technology products that create value and deliver company results across critical areas of their business. Bring your curiosity for learning, bold ideas, courage and passion to drive life-changing impact to ZS.

ZS Engineering Lab is seeking highly skilled professionals to design, develop, and deliver sophisticated technical solutions, including products, applications, reporting systems, and data-driven platforms. This role emphasizes deep technical expertise, rigorous problem-solving, and mastery of engineering practices across cloud, data, and ML/AI domains. We offer competitive compensation, a structured progression framework, and opportunities to enhance technical capabilities at each level. Ideal candidates are committed to technical excellence and continuous learning in a long-term, challenging, and rewarding environment.

Sr. Associate Engineer – AI Full Stack Developer

The Sr. Associate Engineer will support the design, deployment, and scaling of Large Language Model (LLM)-based solutions in a Pharma R&D environment. This role sits at the intersection of AI Engineering, Data Science, and Business stakeholders, partnering with Research, IT, and Digital teams to build production-grade AI applications that drive scientific value. The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering skills with experience in machine learning/LLM systems and thrives in a client-facing, regulated enterprise environment.

What you’ll do:

LLM Application Engineering & POC Development

• Partner with Data Scientists, Scientific SMEs, and IT stakeholders to design and develop LLM-enabled POCs for Research use cases (e.g., literature mining, target assessment, study insights).
• Translate scientific and business requirements into scalable AI application architectures.
• Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.
• Optimize LLM performance for large datasets and complex domain queries.
• Ensure enterprise-grade scalability, security, and performance of deployed applications.
• Drive transition from prototype to production-ready systems.

Production Support

• Provide Tier 1–3 support for LLM-based applications in production.
• Monitor system performance and proactively identify issues.
• Perform root cause analysis for recurring issues and implement preventive measures.
• Collaborate across engineering, cloud, and security teams to resolve complex technical challenges.
• Maintain detailed technical documentation, support runbooks, and knowledge artifacts.
• Ensure adherence to enterprise data security, privacy, and regulatory standards (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11 awareness preferred).

Automated Testing & DevOps Enablement

• Design and implement automated testing frameworks for LLM-based systems.
• Build unit, integration, and end-to-end test suites (including LLM evaluation testing).
• Develop evaluation frameworks for:
• Hallucination detection
• Output consistency
• Prompt robustness
• Latency & performance benchmarking
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Contribute to DevSecOps best practices in a regulated environment.

Cloud & Architecture Engineering

• Develop and deploy applications on AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, ECS, etc.).
• Implement containerized deployments (Docker, ECS).
• Design optimized database architectures (Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redshift).
• Support secure API development and enterprise integration patterns.
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture and cybersecurity teams.

Client-Facing & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Engage directly with Pharma Data Science, Research, and IT stakeholders.
• Lead technical working sessions and whiteboarding discussions.
• Present solution architectures and trade-offs to business audiences.
• Contribute to roadmap planning and technical design documentation.
• Balance rapid innovation with governance, compliance, and change management requirements.

What you’ll bring:

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field.

Technical Skills:

Core Engineering

• Proficiency in Python (required), SQL; experience with R or JavaScript a plus.
• Experience building web applications (Streamlit, Shiny, React, Vue, etc.).
• Strong understanding of REST APIs and microservices architecture.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Agile SDLC practices.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, S3, RDS requ