Associate Director AI Operations

Working with Us
Challenging. Meaningful. Life-changing. Those aren’t words that are usually associated with a job. But working at Bristol Myers Squibb is anything but usual. Here, uniquely interesting work happens every day, in every department. From optimizing a production line to the latest breakthroughs in cell therapy, this is work that transforms the lives of patients, and the careers of those who do it. You’ll get the chance to grow and thrive through opportunities uncommon in scale and scope, alongside high-achieving teams. Take your career farther than you thought possible.

Bristol Myers Squibb recognizes the importance of balance and flexibility in our work environment. We offer a wide variety of competitive benefits, services and programs that provide our employees with the resources to pursue their goals, both at work and in their personal lives. Read more: careers.bms.com/working-with-us.

The Associate Director of Analytics Operations for AI Applications is responsible for leading the operational strategy, execution, and continuous improvement of Bristol Myers Squibb’s Global Product Development and Supply (GPS) AI initiatives. This pivotal role bridges the gap between development and operational domains, ensuring that AI products and services are delivered efficiently, responsibly, and at scale. The ideal candidate will possess extensive experience in managing complex technology workflows, a strong understanding of AI and machine learning lifecycles, and a demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment across engineering, product, data science, compliance, and business units.

This position is critical to enhancing the operational maturity of GPS Business Insights & Technology (BI&T) AI initiatives. The Associate Director will oversee the transition of AI solutions from development to production, ensuring they deliver measurable business value while maintaining high standards of security, compliance, and responsible use.

Based on your function, department or individual position, you will have the opportunity to discuss with your Manager the option to work remotely up to 50% of the time, over a two-week period, with the flexibility to choose the days that align with your collaboration needs. 

• Develop and execute operational plans that support deployment, scaling, and maintenance of AI applications across the GPS organization.
• Establish KPIs, performance dashboards, and operational health metrics to promote transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Optimize processes, workflows, and resource planning for all AI operations activities, from model development through production deployment.
• Provide operational support for production AI/ML applications, ensuring availability, performance, and stability.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues across data pipelines, model deployments, microservices, and integration layers.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions tailored to AI workload behavior.
• Maintain runbooks, operational documentation, and incident response procedures.
• Develop and maintain reliability engineering practices for AI systems, including SLO/SLI definitions and capacity planning.
• Conduct root cause analysis (RCA) for incidents and drive continuous improvement to prevent recurrence.
• Optimize system performance, cost efficiency, and resource utilization.

• Oversee end-to-end operations of AI products, including data ingestion, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and retraining.
• Ensure the reliable, secure, and compliant functioning of AI systems in production environments.
• Collaborate with engineering and data science teams to streamline MLOps practices, automate pipelines, and enhance system resilience.
• Deploy and manage containerized workloads using Kubernetes or similar orchestration frameworks.
• Support and enhance CI/CD and MLOps pipelines used for model training, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Automate operational tasks such as environment provisioning, configuration, scaling, and failover processes.
• Partner with data scientists and ML engineers to ensure smooth handoff from development to production operations.

• Work closely with AI/ML teams, software engineering, data engineering, product management, and IT security.
• Act as a technical resource during design reviews, architecture planning, and operational readiness assessments.
• Facilitate cross-team communication to align on timelines, priorities, and dependencies.
• Maintain documentation and reporting that fulfill internal and external requirements, including model explainability, versioning, and validation.

• Lead and mentor a team of AI operations specialists, Cloud Engineers, and DevOps professionals.
• Foster a culture focused on operational excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Identify skill gaps, assess training needs, and create opportunities for team growth.
• Provide mentorship and guidance to junior engineers and operations staff.
• Dedicate approximately 50% of time as an Individual Contributor to ensure excellence in daily team activities.

• Ensure adherence to regulatory standards and risk management best practices.
• Implement security controls, identity/access management, and compliance requirements for AI workloads.
• Support model governance workflows, including versioning, audit trails, and documentation.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to maintain secure and compliant environments.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Management, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Over 10 years of experience in operations for technology products, with at least 2 years focused on AI/ML, data platforms, and cloud-based systems.
• Proven experience with ITIL practices, and incident management frameworks
• Hands-on experience with cloud environments (AWS), including compute, networking, IAM, and storage.
• Strong proficiency with Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized application architectures.
• Experience with automation tools and IaC frameworks (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, etc.).
• Familiarity with MLOps tools and workflows (e.g., MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI, Databricks).
• Proficient in scripting languages such as Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across distributed systems, databases, APIs, and pipelines
• Experience managing cross-functional teams and delivering complex technical initiatives.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and organizational skills.

• Master’s degree or MBA.
• Experience in high-compliance sectors such as pharmaceuticals or healthcare.
• Experience supporting AI/ML applications or generative AI workloads (LLMs, vector databases, embedding pipelines).
• Knowledge of observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk).
• Familiarity with ITIL practices, change management, and incident management frameworks.
• Certifications in cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), DevOps, or MLOps.

• Operational Excellence: Expertise in building scalable systems, optimizing workflows, and streamlining execution.
• Technical Depth: Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud architecture, and AI/ML operational workflows.
• Leadership: Skilled in coaching teams, influencing across functions, and managing change.
• Problem Solving: Ability to diagnose complex issues and design durable solutions.
• Automation Mindset: Focused on eliminating manual toil and improving operational efficiency.
• Collaboration: Comfortable working across data, engineering, security, and product teams.
• Reliability Focus: Dedicated to building robust, resilient, and well-monitored systems.

Why you should apply

• You will help patients in their fight against serious diseases
• You will be part of a company that encourages excellence and innovation, respects diversity, develops leaders and values its employees.
• You’ll get a competitive salary and a great benefits package including, but not only, an annual bonus, pension contribution, family health insurance, 27 days of annual leave , access to BMS Cruiserath on-site gym and life assurance

#LI-Hybrid

If you come across a role that intrigues you but doesn’t perfectly line up with your resume, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be one step away from work that will transform your life and career.

Uniquely Interesting Work, Life-changing Careers
With a single vision as inspiring as “Transforming patients’ lives through science™ ”, every BMS employee plays an integral role in work that goes far beyond ordinary. Each of us is empowered to apply our individual talents and unique perspectives in a supportive culture, promoting global participation in clinical trials, while our shared values of passion, innovation, urgency, accountability, inclusion and integrity bring out the highest potential of each of our colleagues.

On-site Protocol

BMS has an occupancy structure that determines where an employee is required to conduct their work. This structure includes site-essential, site-by-design, field-based and remote-by-design jobs. The occupancy type that you are assigned is determined by the nature and responsibilities of your role:

Site-essential roles require 100% of shifts onsite at your assigned facility. Site-by-design roles may be eligible for a hybrid work model with at least 50% onsite at your assigned facility. For these roles, onsite presence is considered an essential job function and is critical to collaboration, innovation, productivity, and a positive Company culture. For field-based and remote-by-design roles the ability to physically travel to visit customers, patients or business partners and to attend meetings on behalf of BMS as directed is an essential job function.

Supporting People with Disabilities

BMS is dedicated to ensuring that people with disabilities can excel through a transparent recruitment process, reasonable workplace accommodations/adjustments and ongoing support in their roles. Applicants can request a reasonable workplace accommodation/adjustment prior to accepting a job offer. If you require reasonable accommodations/adjustments in completing this application, or in any part of the recruitment process, direct your inquiries to [email protected]. Visit careers.bms.com/eeo-accessibility to access our complete Equal Employment Opportunity statement.

Candidate Rights

BMS will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, pursuant to applicable laws in your area.

If you live in or expect to work from Los Angeles County if hired for this position, please visit this page for important additional information: https://careers.bms.com/california-residents/

Data Protection

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Any data processed in connection with role applications will be treated in accordance with applicable data privacy policies and regulations.