Senior AI Engineer (R&D) | Life Sciences

Who we are

ADC is a boutique Data and AI consultancy with offices in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, and an award-winning data design studio (CLEVER°FRANKE) embedded in the group. We help data-driven leaders in complex, high-stakes environments move fast without losing control. We deliver four core outcomes: growing revenue and margin, moving from AI pilots to scale, reducing risk while staying confidently compliant, and building data products people love to use.

We are a collective of statisticians, designers, scientists, and ML/AI engineers with deep expertise in the industries we serve: financial services, life sciences, healthcare, the public sector, retail, agriculture, and transportation. We do not arrive with generic tools and a slide deck. We walk in, work alongside the people who know the organisation best, and build solutions that actually run. We call ourselves Wayfinders. Our clients trust us to navigate complexity and make it real: turning ambition into action in environments where the margin for error is small and the consequences of getting it wrong are real, for customers, employees, supply chains, and the bottom line.

Shape the Future of Agentic AI in Life Sciences R&D with ADC

Our Engineering & Analytics team designs and builds agentic AI systems for data-heavy, often regulated environments, from document-intensive processes to complex internal workflows and analytics. We are looking for a Senior AI Engineer who can take an agentic solution from idea to production independently - shaping the architecture with clients and owning the implementation end to end, from agent logic and backend services to cloud infrastructure and deployment. You’ll work closely with client engineering teams, product owners, business managers, and senior leaders, so you need to be able to explain technical decisions clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Where you'll make an impact

Agentic System Design & Build

• Design and build agentic workflows, including multi-step agents, tool use, orchestration, memory, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.

• Build skills/plugins and connectors that give agents safe, well-scoped access to client systems and data; review platform tools and connectors and recommend what to enable or disable based on security, data protection, and research value.

• Build MCP connectors and skills linking the assistant to client systems such as on-prem data lakes and HPC clusters.

• Own solutions end to end: architecture, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and handover, working side by side with client’s IT, engineering, scientific teams, and subject matter experts to deliver well-documented, maintainable components. 

• Build the backend around the agents: APIs, data pipelines, and integrations with client systems.

RAG, Guardrails & Governance

• Design, build, and tune RAG pipelines end to end, from ingestion and chunking to embeddings, search, reranking, generation, and evaluation.

• Design and implement AI guardrails and governance layers, including input and output filtering, policy enforcement, PII handling, and audit trails.

• Set up and operate AI gateways that manage model routing, access control, rate limits, cost tracking, and logging across providers and teams.

• Build evaluation and observability into every agent system so quality can be measured, not just assumed.

Cloud & Delivery

• Set up and manage cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and environments, with security and compliance in mind.

• Contribute to reusable patterns and reference architectures that the team can apply across engagements.

Client Engagement

• Take part in client workshops, scoping, and technical discovery, turning business problems into workable designs.

• Share knowledge internally and contribute to ADC's thought leadership in agentic AI and GenAI engineering.

What you bring

At ADC, we're not just consultants: we're leading experts in Data & AI, with deep expertise in the industries we serve. What unites us is a shared way of working: breaking down complex challenges to change how organisations operate.

For this role, that means:

• A strong technical academic background: Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Bioinformatics or a related field.

• 3+ years of software engineering experience, with at least +1 year building production LLM or agent-based systems.

• Strong Python proficiency, with experience building APIs and backend services.

• Hands-on experience with:

  • Agent frameworks and patterns (for example LangGraph, tool calling, MCP, or custom orchestration), and a clear view of when not to use an agent.

  • Building production RAG pipelines: embeddings selection, chunking and parsing of messy real-world content (PDFs, tables, scanned files), vector databases and hybrid search, advanced patterns such as graph-based or multi-hop retrieval, incremental indexing as source data changes, and diagnosing retrieval/generation failures.

  • AI safety and control in production: guardrails (prompt injection defense, content/PII filtering, output validation), AI gateways or proxies (for example LiteLLM, Azure API Management, or Portkey), and access control, rate limiting, and audit logging for LLM traffic.

  • Evaluating LLM systems systematically: retrieval quality, answer quality (groundedness, LLM-as-judge), and regression testing as prompts and models change.

  • Designing systems in regulated or security-sensitive environments with awareness of data governance frameworks.

• A good understanding of how language models work: transformer architecture, attention, tokenization, context windows, and the trade-offs between prompting, fine-tuning, and retrieval 

• Solid cloud experience on Azure or AWS, including containers, infrastructure as code, networking basics, and identity and access management; Databricks experience is a plus.

• Comfortable working directly with clients and presenting technical decisions to mixed audiences; consulting or customer-facing delivery experience is a plus.
  

What's in it for you

At ADC, you're part of the collective from day one. We want you to grow, experiment, and shape your own path while working on projects that matter. That means:

• Impact you can point to: You'll see your work in action and our projects change how organisations make decisions.

• Real responsibility, real support: You'll work alongside experienced experts from the start, learning by doing with mentorship and feedback built in.

• The freedom to try new things: Spot a better way to build something? A smarter process? We want people who challenge the status quo.

• Collective Week: Once a year, we go on a workation with the whole ADC team. We work on pro bono projects, explore new ideas, and make the kind of memories you'll want to talk about.

• Ownership opportunities: We offer a competitive salary and bonus structure, plus the opportunity to invest in the company and become a co-owner once specific conditions are met. We mean it when we say collective.

• A vibrant culture: Friday breakfast, sports, social events, and much more: a culture you'll notice from day one.

What to do next

If you believe in building with heart, thrive on collaboration, and want to grow with a team that challenges and supports you, we want to meet you! If this sounds like your next challenge, apply through the link below.

*Amsterdam Data Collective is an equal opportunity employer. To shape a better future, we value diversity and promote equality. No characteristics are discriminated against, as indicated in Directive 2000/78/EC. We encourage and welcome all applications. Additional arrangements or adjustments to support your application can be discussed further.