Contract, AI Software Engineer

PTC Therapeutics is a global commercial biopharmaceutical company dedicated to extending life’s moments for individuals with rare diseases. They are seeking an experienced AI Software Engineer to leverage artificial intelligence in redefining key aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on drug discovery and development. The role involves designing and maintaining AI solutions to accelerate business initiatives while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain LLM-powered services, including prompt pipelines, embeddings, vector indexing, and retrieval logic
• Build and maintain Python backend services with scalable, reliable architecture
• Integrate internal and external APIs to support end-to-end AI workflows
• Implement and optimize RAG pipelines, chunking, reranking, and text-processing components
• Collaborate with engineers and cross-functional partners to turn requirements into solutions
• Write clean, tested, well-documented code and participate in high-quality code reviews
• Ensure security, privacy, and compliance in all data-handling and code practices
• Troubleshoot and optimize existing AI/ML pipelines for performance and maintainability

Requirements:

• 1+ years of strong Python engineering (OOP, typing, testing, clean architecture, PEP-8 discipline), with at least 2 years building production LLM applications
• Proven experience deploying LLM-powered applications in production
• Hands-on experience with LLM frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Sentence Transformers, vector stores, and rerankers
• Understanding of embeddings / vector search techniques (cosine similarity, semantic scoring)
• Backend API engineering: FastAPI or similar frameworks (Flask, Starlette), RESTful design, authentication flows
• SQL proficiency: schema design, indexing, query optimization. SQLAlchemy experience preferred
• Cloud experience: Azure preferred (App Services, Storage, Cognitive Search, Key Vault)
• Production-grade code practices: error handling, logging, documentation, and maintainability
• Strong Git workflow discipline (PR quality, branching strategies, code review)
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, comfortable working independently and asynchronously across time zones
• Minimum of 1 year work experience in a role focused on developing AI / software solutions
• SQLAlchemy experience preferred
• Familiarity with React/TypeScript and frontend API integration is a plus
• Experience with logging/telemetry/observability tools (Application Insights, structured logging) is a plus