Senior Associate

Pfizer's AI Acceleration (AIA) function, part of the Chief Marketing Office (CMO), spearheads the design, delivery, and scale-up of critical AI capabilities across Commercial operations. AIA collaborates closely with diverse Pfizer functions to deploy and maintain production-grade AI solutions that enhance efficiency and deliver tangible value across all processes. This role is based in Mumbai, India.

As a Senior Associate, Backend Engineer, you will be instrumental in developing and scaling the backend systems that power autonomous, tool-using AI agents. Your focus will be on constructing reliable, high-performance services that facilitate multi-step reasoning, planning, memory, retrieval, and tool integration within AI-driven workflows. Key responsibilities include:

• Building automated evaluation pipelines to ensure agent reliability, accuracy, and safety.
• Implementing multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool-execution loops.
• Deploying and maintaining services using Docker, CI/CD, and cloud environments.
• Ensuring adherence to security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and data protection requirements.
• Developing state and memory systems for agent context and knowledge retention.
• Optimizing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and retrieval infrastructure.
• Implementing guardrails, validation layers, retry logic, and failure-handling mechanisms.
• Developing monitoring for agent behavior, performance, cost, and decision paths.
• Architecting scalable, fault-tolerant backend systems with robust observability and logging.
• Building backend services that support agentic and generative AI workflows.
• Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with APIs, tools, databases, and external systems.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 2-5 years of experience in software engineering, data science, or related technical fields.

Backend Engineering Expertise:

• Proficiency in Python.
• Experience with FastAPI or Flask.
• Knowledge of REST APIs, asynchronous processing, and distributed workers.
• Experience with relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.

System Design & Operations Skills:

• Hands-on experience with observability tools (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Proficiency with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms.

Security & Compliance Knowledge:

• Understanding of API security, RBAC, and data handling best practices.
• Experience working with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and sensitive data.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar.
• Understanding of tool-calling, structured outputs, and prompt reliability.
• Experience with LLMs from providers like OpenAI/Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, or open-source LLMs.
• Experience with multi-agent workflows.
• Exposure to workflow orchestration tools like Airflow, Temporal, Dagster, or Prefect.
• Familiarity with model serving frameworks such as vLLM, Ray Serve, TGI, or Modal.
• Understanding of AI safety, guardrails, and evaluation frameworks.

Pfizer is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.