Associate Principal AI Engineer - Mathematical Optimisation

Role: Associate Principal AI Engineer - Mathematical Optimisation

Location: Cambridge UK

Salary: Competitive + Excellent Benefits

Do you have expertise in, and passion for Operations Research and AI? Would you like to apply your modelling expertise in a company that follows the science and turns ideas into life changing medicines? Then AstraZeneca might be the place for you!

Disrupt an industry and change lives

At AstraZeneca, we are committed to being a great place to work, where people are empowered to push the boundaries of science and make a meaningful impact on patients, medicine, and society. We foster an inclusive culture built on diversity, collaboration, and continuous learning.

In technology, you will be encouraged to take ownership, challenge the status quo, and drive innovation. By enabling the business to operate faster and more effectively, you will help deliver solutions that ultimately improve lives around the world.

What you'll do

The ideal candidate will bring proven experience in designing, developing, and supporting end-to-end AI and optimisation solutions across a broad range of business challenges.

This role offers the opportunity to work on some of the most complex and high-impact AI and optimisation engineering problems in the pharmaceutical industry. As part of a global team of AI engineers, data scientists, scientists, and software developers, you will help design, build, and support tools that transform how AstraZeneca operates at scale, improving efficiency in our mission to benefit millions of patients worldwide.

You will work closely with engineering and product teams to deliver and support scalable solutions within the AstraZeneca technology landscape, while championing software engineering best practices across the organisation.

We are looking for an engineer who can build and maintain robust, accurate, and reliable end-to-end AI solutions used across AstraZeneca. You should be comfortable working with complex systems and applying AI and optimisation at scale to drive productivity and business impact.

Key Accountabilities

• Contribute to design and development of end-to-end AI solutions that include mathematical optimisation, modelling, and simulation approaches.


• Visualise complex datasets and model outputs using the latest front-end technologies.


• Work together with senior optimisation engineers and AI engineers in the team, focused on product delivery and support.


• Liaise with other engineers to enhance our technological stack, to enable the adoption of the latest advances in AI and software engineering.


• Contribute to various solutions and applications that may cover a broad range of business areas, sometimes at once.


• Be self-driven, curious, innovative, deeply technical and learn continuously.

Essential for the role

• Experience and demonstrable technical skills in developing operations research solutions for complex real-world problems.


• Demonstrated experience using mathematical optimisation software such as CPLEX, Gurobi, SCIP, or OR-Tools.


• Experience with heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms as an alternative to the above software.


• A working knowledge of optimisation, simulation, and statistical concepts.


• A working knowledge of LLM tools.


• Experience in good software development practice, ideally including Python, and deployment practices such as CI/CD, testing, version control.


• A track record of understanding and translating complex business challenges into well-defined engineering problems.


• Creative, collaborative, & product focused.


• MSc or above.

Desirable for the role

• Experience of adjacent topics such as control and robotics.


• Experience in the deployment of AI tools.


• Experience in developing and deploying interactive applications (e.g., full-stack apps, dashboarding).

Our mission is to build an inclusive and equitable environment. We want people to feel they belong at AstraZeneca and Alexion, starting with our recruitment process. We welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of characteristics. We offer reasonable adjustments/accommodations to help all candidates to perform at their best. If you have a need for any adjustments/accommodations, please complete the section in the application form.