Principal AI Systems Engineer

About   Iovance Biotherapeutics, Inc.   Iovance Biotherapeutics , Inc.  is the global leader in innovating, developing, and delivering tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) cell therapies for patients with solid tumors. Amtagvi® (lifileucel) is the first FDA-approved, one-time treatment for previously treated advanced melanoma, now approved in three global markets and available at more than 95 authorized treatment centers. The  Iovance TIL platform  spans registrational trials and next-generation programs in additional solid tumors, including gene-edited and IL-12 tethered TIL therapies, next-generation IL-2, and precision immuno-oncology approaches. As the first and only company to take TIL therapy from concept to a broadly accessible commercial treatment, Iovance operates as an end-to-end cell therapy company, anchored by fully owned, centralized U.S.-based manufacturing that is scaled to serve thousands of cancer patients worldwide each year. For more information, please visit  www.iovance.com . Amtagvi® and its accompanying design marks, Proleukin ® , Iovance ® , and IovanceCares™ are trademarks and registered trademarks of Iovance Biotherapeutics, Inc. or its subsidiaries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Information on Iovance’s broad, industry-leading patent portfolio is available on the Intellectual Property page on  www.iovance.com . Overview This is a senior role responsible for the hands-on design, build, validation, and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems at Iovance Biotherapeutics. This role is focused on execution — turning approved use cases into working, validated, production AI systems that deliver measurable business value. This role directly supports Iovance’s strategy to improve overall operational productivity. The ideal candidate is a deeply technical, hands-on senior engineer with demonstrated production experience designing and shipping Large Language Model (LLM) applications, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, and modern AI integrations. This position works closely with IT leads, business process owners across Manufacturing, Quality, Regulatory Affairs, Clinical, Commercial, G&A, IT Security, Privacy, and Quality Assurance to deliver AI capabilities that respect Iovance’s regulated environment. This role executes against a roadmap and prioritized backlog, while contributing technical input to refinement, scoping, and sequencing. Primary Responsibilities • Design, build, and ship AI systems against the approved Iovance AI roadmap, including end-to-end ownership of architecture, retrieval pipelines, prompts, evaluation, integrations, and deployment for assigned use cases. • Implement production-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems on Iovance’s AWS infrastructure (S3, Redshift, Bedrock), including chunking strategies, embedding selection, vector storage, retrieval and reranking, grounding, and citation handling appropriate to high-accuracy use cases. • Build, maintain, and run evaluation harnesses for AI systems, including held-out test sets, accuracy and grounding metrics, hallucination detection, adversarial inputs, and regression testing across model and prompt changes; treat evaluation as a first-class engineering deliverable, not an afterthought. • Design and implement integrations between AI systems and Iovance enterprise systems using Model Context Protocol (MCP), APIs, and event-driven patterns, applying least-privilege access principles and partnering with IT Security on integration approval. • Own and maintain LLM security controls for production AI systems, including input and output guardrails, prompt injection and jailbreak defenses, sensitive data redaction (PII, PHI, Iovance Confidential