Associate, Data Science & Applied AI

Job Title: Associate, Data Science & Applied AI

Company: West Pharmaceutical Services

About the Role

This is an early-career, hybrid position requiring 3 days per week onsite. The role combines applied AI, software engineering, and business problem-solving to design, build, and scale AI-enabled solutions. You will work with senior engineers, business teams, and subject-matter experts to develop AI assistants, agentic workflows, intelligent search, machine-learning solutions, and decision-support applications, supporting the full solution lifecycle from problem definition to continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with business and technical teams to translate business problems into defined AI use cases and technical requirements.
• Build AI assistants, retrieval-augmented generation applications, agentic workflows, and machine-learning solutions.
• Develop application components using Python, SQL, APIs, and modern web technologies.
• Prepare and integrate structured and unstructured data from approved enterprise sources.
• Develop prompts, retrieval pipelines, tool integrations, and evaluation datasets.
• Test solutions for accuracy, groundedness, robustness, latency, safety, and cost.
• Support source control, automated testing, CI/CD, monitoring, and application telemetry.
• Assist with deployment, production support, and continuous improvement of AI applications.
• Follow West requirements for information security, data privacy, responsible AI, software quality, and system lifecycle management.
• Document solutions and communicate technical findings, limitations, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Perform other duties as assigned based on business needs.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Proficiency in Python and working knowledge of SQL.
• Familiarity with JavaScript or TypeScript and frameworks such as React.
• Understanding of APIs, testing, debugging, data structures, and version control.
• Familiarity with large language models, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, and tool calling.
• Exposure to Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Machine Learning, or comparable cloud platforms.
• Familiarity with Git, Docker, automated testing, and CI/CD concepts.
• Ability to analyze ambiguous problems and develop practical, testable solutions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to work effectively with business experts, engineers, and global cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated experience building at least one functioning software, machine-learning, or generative-AI application.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Equivalent demonstrated technical experience may be considered.
• 0-2 years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, data science, or applied AI.
• Internships, academic research, open-source contributions, and substantial independent projects may be considered as relevant experience.
• Ability to comply with West’s quality, safety, information-security, and data-privacy policies.

Preferred Experience & Skills

• Multidisciplinary experience applying AI to scientific problems (e.g., biology and AI, mathematics and AI, materials science and AI).
• Experience in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, life sciences, or regulated manufacturing.
• Interdisciplinary education combining AI or computational methods with biology, mathematics, materials science, chemistry, pharmaceutical science, or engineering.

Travel Requirements

• 5% (Up to 13 business days per year)

Physical Requirements

• Sedentary work: Exerting up to 10 lbs/4 kgs of force occasionally, and/or negligible amount of force frequently or constantly to lift, carry, push, pull, or otherwise move objects. Sedentary work involves sitting most of the time.