Senior Principal AI Engineer — AI Solutions (Enabling Functions) – Global Corporate Affairs

Posted date Jul. 31, 2026 Contract type Full time Job ID R-257488

Why choose AstraZeneca Spain?

AstraZeneca Spain is a rising force in our global business. With headquarters in Madrid and our global hub in Barcelona, we’ve become an important international centre of excellence in the fight against critical disease. Boasting vibrant universities and business schools, the Barcelona ecosystem is a place where scientists can thrive. We attract a diverse workforce from across the globe, shining a beacon for innovation in a country that’s committed to clinical development.

We invite you to bring your talents to Barcelona where our respiratory medicine R\&D and Global Marketing centre offers opportunities in R\&D, IT, Commercial and HR. Or join us in Madrid and shape our growth in our BUs (Respiratory, Oncology \& CVRM ), and a range of Corporate functions. Additionally, you can find sales roles throughout the country. Together, we’re contributing to a world-leading pipeline of therapeutics and delivering life-changing medicines to patients.

Who do we look for?

Calling all tech innovators, ownership takers, challenge seekers and proactive collaborators. At AstraZeneca Spain, breakthroughs born in the lab become transformative medicine for the world's most complex diseases. Alongside technical expertise, colleagues have the resilience, energy and collaborative mindset to change lanes, work with different teams and start projects from scratch.

Here, diverse minds and bold disruptors can meaningfully impact the future of healthcare using cutting-edge technology. Whether you join us in Madrid or Barcelona, you can make a tangible impact within a global biopharmaceutical company that invests in your future. Join a talented global team that's powering AstraZeneca to better serve patients every day.

Success Profile

Ready to make an impact in your career? If you're passionate, growth-orientated and a true team player, we'll help you succeed. Here are some of the skills and capabilities we look for.

Diverse collaborators

This is a speak-up culture that values collaboration. You’ll proactively bring your unique perspectives, experiences and skills to the table and seek the same from others. With our international team composition and the need for fast-paced collaboration, you’ll always be building new connections with colleagues.

Cutting-edge innovators

When you join us, you’ll be part of a team that embraces digital technology and data to transform the way we work and the work we do. Every day, you’ll help make history, empowered to ignite your creativity and build something enduring.

Resilient trailblazers

Here, the answers aren’t always available. So, you’ll need to bring a fearless, self-starter mindset to navigate uncharted territories. You’ll harness your ceaseless energy to discover and make the necessary connections with colleagues to shape the future and achieve maximum impact.

Agile movers

Seize ownership and excel with autonomy to enjoy the constant rush of ground-breaking discovery. Your ability to anticipate sudden shifts and adapt swiftly will prove critical as you make your mark in an environment that rewards initiative and resilience.

Responsibilities

Job ID R-257488 Date posted 07/31/2026 Are you the hands-on AI builder who turns sophisticated governance into code and ships production systems that stand up to regulators, auditors, and real users? Can you move from idea to working proof-of-concept in days, then mature it into a resilient, governed application that powers how a global corporate affairs function engages, creates and delivers value.

AstraZeneca Global Corporate Affairs (GCA) is reimagining how Corporate Affairs work gets done: using AI to improve speed, precision and quality while protecting the trust, relationships, judgement and creativity that sit at the heart of what we do. This role gives you the chance to build where strategy meets real work — shaping practical AI products, data foundations and operating models that help GCA deliver greater impact for AstraZeneca and, ultimately, for patients. You will be the technical authority within a high-impact squad, partnering closely with engineering leadership, enterprise technology, data engineering, legal, security, and the Global Corporate Affairs team. In this builder-first role, you design multi-agent architectures, build RAG pipelines over real enterprise corpora, route models across regions to respect sovereignty requirements, and ship governed applications into live environments. You will set engineering standards by example while remaining the most prolific builder on the team.

Accountabilities

• Technical Design and Solution Architecture: Lead the end-to-end technical design for AI solutions across Global Corporate Affairs, and from GCA to the enterprise or defined stakeholder groups —selecting patterns, defining component boundaries, and making build-versus-integrate decisions aligned to the squad’s architectural direction.
• High-Consequence Decisions: Make and document model strategy choices (foundation models, fine-tuning, multi-provider orchestration, RAG), integration patterns, and tooling with clear rationale against product requirements and compliance constraints.
• Platform and Reuse: Identify and build shared components, reusable agent patterns, and governance instrumentation that speed delivery across the portfolio—championing platform thinking over one-off projects.
• Data Sovereignty in Code: Translate sovereignty policy into working infrastructure—implementing model routing, data residency, and hosting decisions that respect jurisdictional boundaries and cross-border transfer requirements.
• Hands-On Multi-Agent Delivery: Design and ship multi-agent LLM systems across providers, write the orchestration code, implement sovereignty-aware routing, and ensure safe outcomes with human-gated control where needed.
• Vendor \& technology partnership: Act as GCA's technical advisor on AI and digital solutions, working closely with external vendors, agencies and third-party technology providers to evaluate tools, shape requirements, ensure compliant and responsible use, and recommend the most effective solutions based on business needs, user experience, scalability, security and value.
• Production RAG Pipelines: Build governed RAG pipelines with hallucination guards before any user-facing output and immutable audit logging at every stage—from ingestion through to response.
• Rapid Prototyping with Production Intent: Deliver POCs in days with clear progression gates to pilot and production, using real data and defined success criteria.
• Governance-as-Code: Implement classification/tiering logic, model registration, approval workflows, monitoring pipelines, decommissioning controls, human-in-the-loop oversight, deterministic routing layers, model/data cards, and full audit trails as first-class engineering components.
• Multi-Jurisdictional Compliance: Engineer systems that meet data protection laws, AI-specific regulations (e.g., EU risk classifications), and sector-specific operational resilience expectations—coding for divergence to remain defensible under multiple regimes.
• Operational Resilience: Bake resilience into architecture with circuit breakers, provider fallbacks, graceful degradation, fail-safe defaults, tested failover paths, and chaos/resilience testing to defined tolerances.
• Delivery and MLOps: Own delivery from design to production, scaling, monitoring, and lifecycle management; establish CI/CD, automated testing, performance monitoring, incident response automation, and capacity management.
• Data Engineering and Controls: Build pipelines, feature stores, and data products for quality, governance, and reuse; implement data quality, lineage, and controls for financially material data, legally privileged documents, employee-sensitive information, and supplier-confidential data.
• Model Quality and Assurance: Implement drift and bias monitoring, lead AI red-teaming, embed fairness and explainability pipelines, manage technical risks, and produce assurance reporting for internal and external oversight.
• Scaling Through Reuse and Partnership: Adapt solutions across functions (e.g., from contract intelligence in Legal to supplier risk in Procurement), contribute patterns to enterprise platforms, and integrate external partners at a technical level to meet production standards.
• Stakeholder Partnership and Adoption: Serve as a credible hands-on partner to Global Corporate Affairs—running technical discovery, prototyping quickly, iterating on UX, and measuring adoption and impact through KPIs/KRIs.
• Enterprise Integration and Standards: Represent delivery in architecture and AI leadership forums, contribute to enterprise AI governance and standards, share patterns, and advocate for the requirements of regulated, process-critical functions.

Essential Skills/Experience

• Built AI applications inside a large, regulated enterprise.
• Demonstrated experience delivering AI solutions across enabling functions such as Corporate Affairs, HR, Legal or Compliance.
• Ability to work forward-deployed: embedded with business teams, translating ambiguous needs into clear technical solutions, prototypes and product increments.
• Significant experience implementing governance controls and embedding operational resilience into your own code and architectures.
• Ability to move from idea to working proof-of-concept in days.
• Depth in AI governance, operational resilience, and regulatory compliance as a core professional discipline—not adjacent knowledge.
• Technical authority who designs multi-agent architectures, writes production code, builds RAG pipelines, and ships governed AI applications into live enterprise environments.
• Experience implementing multi-jurisdictional data sovereignty, regulatory divergence, and cross-border AI governance requirements—translating sovereignty policy into working infrastructure code.
• Treats regulatory requirements and governance as architecture decisions made at the keyboard, not as checklists applied after the fact.
• Proficiency across model strategy (foundation models, fine-tuning, multi-provider orchestration, RAG) and sovereignty-aware model routing.
• Ability to partner effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders, including Corporate Affairs, Enterprise AI, IT, legal, privacy and vendors and third parties.
• Clear communicator who can explain technical choices in plain English and create practical documentation for business users.
• Leads through mentorship, code quality, and engineering standards while remaining a strong individual technical contributor.

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Track record building shared libraries, reusable agent frameworks, governance middleware, and common instrumentation that accelerate delivery.
• Mastery of AI-assisted development to compress delivery timelines while maintaining deliberate human control over architecture, routing, and guardrails.
• Hands-on MLOps experience including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, incident response automation, and capacity management.
• Experience implementing fairness testing, explainability pipelines, AI red-teaming, and assurance reporting suitable for auditors and regulators.
• Resilience engineering expertise including circuit breakers, provider fallbacks, graceful degradation, impact tolerances, and chaos testing.
• Experience implementing classification/tiering logic, model registration systems, approval workflow automation, monitoring pipelines, and lifecycle decommissioning controls.
• Proven partnership across enterprise technology, data engineering, legal, information security, and external technology providers to deliver production-grade solutions.
• Experience instrumenting adoption and value through KPI/KRI design and UX-driven iteration in production.

Why AstraZenecaJoin a technology community where engineers, scientists, and compliance experts share the same whiteboard to unlock the potential of data and AI for patients. We are scaling a bold digital strategy with real investment, modern platforms, and the freedom to experiment—hackathons, rapid prototyping, and production-grade engineering live side by side. Here, ambition is matched by support: we value kindness alongside drive, and we do things the right way, building governed, resilient systems that can be trusted at scale. Your craft will shape how a global company operates today and how quickly life-changing medicines reach people tomorrow.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

If you are ready to build governed, resilient, multi-jurisdictional AI that moves from idea to enterprise impact at speed, join us in Barcelona to lead with your keyboard and deliver what matters!

Date Posted

31-jul-2026 Closing Date

14-ago-2026 AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.

Explore the local area

Take a look at the map to see what’s nearby.

Reasons to Join

Thomas Mathisen

There are many things I enjoy when working at AstraZeneca, mainly the Speak up culture, the great colleagues that are in my teams, the great products that AstraZeneca provides to our patients and the challenging conversations I have around our medicines.

Sales Representative Oslo, Norway There are many things I enjoy when working at AstraZeneca, mainly the Speak up culture, the great colleagues that are in my teams, the great products that AstraZeneca provides to our patients and the challenging conversations I have around our medicines.

Christine Recchio

Working at AstraZeneca has impacted my life in such a positive way. I now have an improved work-life balance through creating my own schedule and time management, I feel a balance that I didn’t have before.

Sales Representative California, United States Working at AstraZeneca has impacted my life in such a positive way. I now have an improved work-life balance through creating my own schedule and time management, I feel a balance that I didn’t have before.

Stephanie Ling

There are a lot of reasons why I enjoy working in AstraZeneca, my colleagues being one of them. My team members and the managers have provided a great deal of guidance in helping me to be more confident in my daily work.

Sales Representative Petaling Jaya, Malaysia There are a lot of reasons why I enjoy working in AstraZeneca, my colleagues being one of them. My team members and the managers have provided a great deal of guidance in helping me to be more confident in my daily work.

What we offer

We're driven by our shared values of serving people, society and the planet. Our people make this possible, which is why we prioritise diversity, inclusivity, balance and sustainability. Discover what a career at AstraZeneca could mean for you.

An award-winning company

We're passionate about being a great place to work, and 84% of our employees would recommend us as an employer. We've been recognised as a Top Employer in Spain, an EFR Family Responsible Business, and we achieved third place in Forbes Spain's Top 50 Best Places to Work list.

Inclusive environment

Diversity and inclusion are embedded in everything we do, and our different views, experiences and strengths enrich our culture. There's no salary gap at AstraZeneca, and the number of female employees has increased by four per cent over the last three years. We've also made all positions fully accessible.

Work-life balance

Your wellbeing means a lot to us, and we're here to support you through all of life's ups and downs. That's why we offer an unpaid leave policy, annual leave, reduced-hours timetables and a host of benefits, including a retirement plan, long service award, and health and travel insurance.

Sustainability initiatives

We're committed to harnessing the power of science to become a more sustainable business. We've reduced our carbon footprint by over 9,000 kg of CO2 over the last two years, and we lead the European GoGreen Project, which aims to introduce environmentally friendly options in our fleet of corporate vehicles.