Job Description

For this Director-level role, we are seeking a scientific and technical expert to lead our agentic AI co-scientist initiative across our scientific organization. This individual will serve as the scientific lead on the project, defining and influencing the strategy, architecture, evaluation framework, and delivery plan for co-scientist capabilities across multiple scientific use cases and functions. This effort will span both internal development of capabilities and rigorous evaluation of externally available tools. As the senior scientific leader of the effort, this individual will align cross-functional stakeholders, prioritize scientific needs and capabilities, and drive measurable progress, adoption, and delivery of a trusted AI capability that augments scientific reasoning, hypothesis generation, experimental planning, and decision support.

This is a Boston based, hybrid position requiring 3 days/week onsite.

Key Duties & Responsibilities:

• Serve as the senior scientific leader for the agentic AI co-scientist project. Through matrixed leadership, lead a cross-functional team across scientific, computational, and technical areas to define priorities, translate Vertex scientific needs into a sequenced roadmap, and deliver scalable agentic AI capabilities. Ensure the initiative remains aligned to priority scientific needs across projects, research sites, and modalities, with clear goals, decision rights, dependencies, risks, and outcomes.
• Drive scientific and technical leadership for internal development of co-scientist capabilities, including development of scientific system skills, integrating existing scientific datasets and methods, and defining agentic roles, skills, and orchestration patterns.
• Lead evaluation of internal and external agentic AI capabilities. Define evidence-based frameworks, benchmarks, and governance to assess commercial, partnership, open-source, and internally developed options and inform build, buy, partner, or integrate decisions.
• Establish rigorous scientific validation standards and governance framework. Define acceptance criteria and ongoing evaluation approaches for correctness, relevance, novelty, reliability, reproducibility, provenance, uncertainty, usability, and measurable impact on scientific decision-making.
• Drive development and deployment across scientific domains and modalities. Partner with scientific leaders and domain experts to identify high-value use cases, translate scientific workflows into agentic AI opportunities, and guide delivery from prototype to supported adoption while preserving human scientific judgment and accountability.
• Represent the co-scientist effort with executive and senior leader stakeholders, providing clear communication on strategy, tradeoffs, progress, risks, resource needs, and delivery milestones, with appropriate decision escalation as needed.
• Shape agentic AI workflows and scientific operating models. Define how agents, models, tools, data, literature, compute, and expert review work together to support complex research questions with appropriate planning, traceability, escalation, and reproducibility.
• Influence data, platform, and infrastructure strategy. Partner with infrastructure and platform leaders to define foundational requirements for trusted data access, knowledge management, model and tool integration, scalable compute, and reliable expansion across functions and modalities.
• Ensure delivery and adoption by driving milestone-based execution, use-case prioritization, change management, stakeholder alignment, and evidence-based decisions on where co-scientist capabilities produce meaningful scientific and organizational value.
• Drive innovation through timely knowledge of emerging technologies, advancements, and challenges in the field of scientific agentic AI, and leverage these external insights to drive a best-in-class AI co-scientist tool.

Knowledge and Skills:

• Deep understanding of drug discovery and scientific research workflows and how shared AI capabilities can address domain-specific needs across functions, therapeutic areas, and modalities.
• Deep expertise in modern AI, including LLMs, agentic systems, scientific foundation models, retrieval, tool use, planning, and evaluation.
• Ability to define rigorous evaluations, benchmarks, validation strategies, and success measures for AI-enabled scientific tools and workflows.
• Exceptional ability to partner effectively with infrastructure and platform collaborators, through platform architecture, tool integration, scalable compute, and reproducible workflows.
• Exceptional ability to partner effectively with scientific collaborators, through strong grasp of scientific needs in drug discovery and research, scientific data strategy, and strategic understanding of relative prioritization and impact of different opportunities.
• Strong strategic judgment, executive communication, stakeholder management, collaboration, and mentoring skills.
• Excellent presentation, verbal, and written communication skills, including effective communication with senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Commitment to scientific rigor, responsible AI, reproducibility, transparency, data governance, cybersecurity, privacy, and appropriate human oversight.
• Demonstrated ability and willingness to teach, engage and support others as they learn new technologies and concepts.
• Enthusiasm for and the ability to quickly learn new technologies and tackle difficult problems.

Education and Experience

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, with 10+ years of relevant experience in scientific drug discovery and research, or comparable training and experience.
• Senior scientific and technical leadership experience in drug discovery, life sciences, AI/ML, computational science, or a closely related field.
• Track record leading complex, cross-functional initiatives from strategy through delivery, adoption, and measurable impact.
• Experience developing, evaluating, deploying, or governing advanced AI, machine learning, computational, or data-driven systems in a scientifically rigorous environment.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders, align teams without direct authority, and make decisions amid scientific, technical, and organizational ambiguity.
• Experience assessing external technologies or partnerships and recommending build, buy, partner, adapt, or integrate options based on evidence and strategic value.
• Recognized scientific impact through publications, patents, deployed capabilities, external presentations, or comparable contributions.

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Pay Range:

$0 - $0

Disclosure Statement:

The range provided is based on what we believe is a reasonable estimate for the base salary pay range for this job at the time of posting. This role is eligible for an annual bonus and annual equity awards. Some roles may also be eligible for overtime pay, in accordance with federal and state requirements. Actual base salary pay will be based on a number of factors, including skills, competencies, experience, and other job-related factors permitted by law.

At Vertex, our Total Rewards offerings also include inclusive market-leading benefits to meet our employees wherever they are in their career, financial, family and wellbeing journey while providing flexibility and resources to support their growth and aspirations. From medical, dental and vision benefits to generous paid time off (including a week-long company shutdown in the Summer and the Winter), educational assistance programs including student loan repayment, a generous commuting subsidy, matching charitable donations, 401(k) and so much more.

Flex Designation:

Hybrid-Eligible Or On-Site Eligible

Flex Eligibility Status:

In this Hybrid-Eligible role, you can choose to be designated as:

1. Hybrid: work remotely up to two days per week; or select
2. On-Site: work five days per week on-site with ad hoc flexibility.

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

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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 person's 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 ApplicationAssistance@vrtx.com.