Senior Software Engineer - Life Sciences.AI

About the role

Who You'll Work With

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.

A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.

Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.

Your Impact

You will design and build differentiated agentic and full-stack applications that address high-value commercial use cases across the Life Sciences sector.

You will help transform standalone pilots into integrated, production-ready systems that reshape end-to-end commercial workflows and drive meaningful impact for patients.

You will independently design and deliver small to mid-sized agentic assets that address complex client problems. With your expertise in multi-agent orchestration and full-stack application building, you will contribute to industry-shaping tools — from persona-specific assistants to a shared mesh of agents powering our clients' future commercial capabilities.

You’ll explore emerging technologies, collaborate with distributed teams, and contribute to cross-functional problem-solving sessions with clients and stakeholders, from data owners to C-level executives, to deliver impactful analytics solutions. By collaborating with diverse teams and leveraging McKinsey’s entrepreneurial culture, you’ll help shift the firm toward asset-based consulting, delivering scalable, reusable, high-value solutions that address critical client needs.

You’ll write high-quality modular code, implement best practices, and act as a thought partner to assess the feasibility of innovative solutions. Your work will help shape reusable components and accelerate product development across infrastructure, platforms, and services.

Your work offers a unique opportunity to grow as a technologist and leader. With McKinsey’s global network, leadership development resources, and exposure to cutting-edge challenges, you’ll expand your expertise, collaborate with inspiring teams, and develop into a technology leader at the forefront of innovation.

You’ll be working in one of our North American offices in our Life Sciences practice. You will help revolutionize how Pharma and MedTech companies connect with their customers to improve human lives. You will be working in a team that is fully integrated with QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.

You will independently architect and deliver small to mid-sized products while contributing to the development of industry-shaping tools. You’ll write high-quality code, implement best practices, and act as a thought partner to assess the feasibility of innovative solutions. Your work will help shape reusable components and accelerate product development across infrastructure, platforms, and services.

There is flexibility to hire at the Senior Software Engineer I/II or Principal Software Engineer I/II level, depending on your experience.

Your Qualifications and Skills

Degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related field

5+ years of experience developing full-stack applications

Demonstrated experience building agentic applications and AI agents. This can include designing and orchestrating single- and multi-agent workflows and agentic systems with SDKs from frontier labs or open-source frameworks and include experience with tool/function calling, memory, planning, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) patterns

Demonstrated knowledge and hands-on experience across the full application stack, i.e., using cloud platforms and containers (e.g. AWS, Azure, Docker) for deploying and managing applications; DevOps (e.g. CircleCI, Git); database (e.g. SQL, PGVector); strong programming skills in Python for agent development; API development; UI framework (React.js, Next.js)

Experience working with knowledge graphs to structure data and ground GenAI/LLM applications is a plus

Demonstrated experience working collaboratively with other developers, as well as technical and non-technical people within software teams

Experience working in Agile teams, including active participation in sprint ceremonies and pair programming with other developers

Exceptional time management to meet your responsibilities in a complex and largely autonomous work environment

Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, in English, with the ability to adjust your style to suit different perspectives and seniority levels