Lead AI Automation Engineer

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas including immunology, oncology, and neuroscience - and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com . Follow @abbvie on LinkedIn, Facebook , Instagram , X and YouTube.

About the role

As a Lead AI Automation Engineer, you will drive measurable business impact by designing and implementing AI-powered automation solutions that transform how our Corporate Services and HR business partners operate. You will serve as the critical bridge between complex business needs and technical execution—deeply understanding current-state processes, translating inefficiencies into innovative automation opportunities, and leveraging enterprise tools and AI agents to deliver rapid ROI. This role uniquely combines hands-on technical leadership with strategic thinking: you will architect end-to-end solutions, build working prototypes, mentor the team in design thinking and agentic development, and ensure every solution drives tangible efficiency gains and value for stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Engage deeply with Corporate Services and HR stakeholders to understand current-state processes, pain points, constraints, to-be business requirements, and success metrics; translate these into technical solution designs that deliver measurable efficiency gains.
• Engineer and implement scalable AI automation solutions; delivering clean, scalable, production-ready code that integrates with enterprise systems and optimizes business partner workflows.
• Prioritize rapid prototyping and iterative development, building working MVPs quickly to validate solutions with stakeholders, then refining based on feedback to accelerate time-to-value.
• Cultivate cross-team relationships while continuously expanding technical knowledge; identifying existing capabilities, shared platforms, and collaborative opportunities that maximize internal resources and drive productivity gains.

Required

• Bachelor's Degree with 7 years of experience; Master's Degree with 6 years; or PhD with 2 years of relevant experience.
• Python proficiency required — expert-level ability to write production-quality code for automation, AI/ML implementations, and enterprise integrations.
• Familiarity with modern AI orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent technologies.
• Proficiency in designing and deploying AI integrations using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) concepts.
• Experience with AI/ML frameworks and tools and understanding of LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, and prompt engineering.
• Proven ability to deliver and maintain production-grade software in enterprise environments, including ongoing support, monitoring, and iterative improvements.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and diagnostic skills with ability to understand business processes and identify automation opportunities.
• Broad technical proficiency across software development, data integration, cloud platforms, and enterprise systems — with ability to rapidly learn and apply new technologies.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Operate with high autonomy and minimal supervision- proactively managing stakeholder expectations and keeping leadership informed through clear, concise verbal and written communication.
• Experience in working with international development teams across multiple time zones.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor technical staff, lead cross-functional teams, and drive initiatives to completion.

Preferred

• Experience in the pharmaceutical industry or other highly regulated environments is preferred.
• Understanding of SDLC methodologies, GxP compliance, and validation requirements is a plus.
• Exposure to graph databases and GraphQL a plus.

Location & Hybrid

This is a hybrid role required to be on-site Tuesday through Thursday every week in Lake County, IL.

Compensation

Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law:
The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location,