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At Cytiva, one of Danaher’s 15+ operating companies, our work saves lives—and we’re all united by a shared commitment to innovate for tangible impact.
You’ll thrive in a culture of belonging where you and your unique viewpoint matter. And by harnessing Danaher’s system of continuous improvement, you help turn ideas into impact – innovating at the speed of life.
Working at Cytiva means being at the forefront of providing new solutions to transform human health. Our incredible customers undertake life-saving activities ranging from fundamental biological research to developing innovative vaccines, new medicines, and cell and gene therapies.
At Cytiva you will be able to continuously improve yourself and us – working on challenges that truly matter with people that care for each other, our customers, and their patients. Take your next step to an altogether life-changing career.
Learn about the Danaher Business System which makes everything possible.
The Senior Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI defines and drives the AI engineering strategy across multiple teams and product domains, setting the architectural direction for our GenAI capabilities and ensuring their long-term scalability, reliability, and impact. This role operates at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational leadership: shaping how we build with AI as an organization, not just contributing to that build.
You will act as a key technical partner to engineering leadership, product teams, and cross-functional stakeholders, aligning people across silos, resolving architectural misalignments, and creating the conditions for teams to move fast and confidently with AI. You bring a systems-level mindset, lead through influence and leave things meaningfully better than you found them — for the technology, and for the people around you.
This is an on-site role in Kraków.
What you will do:
Define and evolve the AI engineering architecture across multiple teams and product domains establishing long-term technical direction for GenAI capabilities and making high-impact decisions with real product and business implications.
Lead cross-team AI initiatives from conception through delivery, reducing friction, duplication, and misalignment across organizational boundaries.
Set org-wide standards for how teams build with GenAI — including RAG architectures, LLM integration patterns, agentic frameworks, and vector search strategies.
Act as a key technical partner to engineering managers, product leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders in shaping AI strategy, roadmap, and investment decisions.
Drive architecture reviews and system design for AI initiatives with significant technical and business implications and help others do the same.
Identify and proactively address long-term risks in AI systems before they become blockers anticipating what others haven't seen yet.
Evaluate, select, and champion AI tooling (LangGraph, LangChain, Cloud AI services, vector stores) at an organizational level, not just for one team, but as reusable, scalable foundations.
Ensure model observability, reliability, quality, and responsible operation across the AI engineering landscape.
Mentor and sponsor Staff and Senior Engineers helping them grow in technical depth, system thinking, and engineering maturity; contributing to leveling and hiring conversations.
Stay ahead of the AI landscape and translate emerging technologies into concrete, org-level opportunities and strategies.
Who you are:
Proven org-level technical impact in the GenAI or AI/ML space with track record of not just building great systems, but shaping how organizations build with AI.
Deep expertise in Generative AI, LLMs, RAG architectures, prompt engineering, and production-grade AI system design. You've seen what good looks like and you've built it.
Demonstrated ability to lead without formal authority - aligning engineers, managers, and stakeholders around a shared technical vision across organizational silos.
Strong architectural thinking at scale: you design for long-term flexibility, organizational complexity, and cross-team reuse not just the immediate problem in front of you.
Experience delivering end-to-end AI solutions from prototype to production, with cross-team coordination and organizational impact.
Strong software engineering fundamentals — clean code, testing, CI/CD, API design — and the credibility and judgment to raise the bar on these across teams, not just within your own work.
Ability to drive clarity in ambiguous spaces — synthesizing complex, messy problems into clear architectural direction and actionable plans that others can execute on.
Experience working with cloud services in production AI environments.
Strong communication skills — you can articulate technical strategy to both engineers and non-technical leadership with equal clarity and conviction.
Experience defining and leading org-wide AI platform initiatives, architecture guilds, or internal AI engineering communities of practice.
A track record of introducing standards, patterns, or frameworks that were adopted broadly across an engineering organization — not just within a single team.
Experience scaling AI capabilities in fast-moving product organizations with all the ambiguity and tradeoffs that come with it.
Hands-on mastery with Python, TypeScript and modern frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, LangChani, Vercel AI SDK)
Background in developer tooling, internal platform engineering and productivit focused AI products.
Familiarity with responsible AI principles and practical experience implementing observability, evaluation pipelines, and safety guardrails in production systems.
#LI-KK1
Join our winning team today. Together, we’ll accelerate the real-life impact of tomorrow’s science and technology. We partner with customers across the globe to help them solve their most complex challenges, architecting solutions that bring the power of science to life.
For more information, visit www.danaher.com.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field
- 10+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience designing AI-enabled or data-intensive systems
- Hands-on experience in LLM or agent-oriented architectures
- Deep software engineering fundamentals
- Proven ability to lead technically across teams
Cepheid Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Cepheid and has not been reviewed or approved by Cepheid.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — PTO and paid holidays are portrayed as robust, with formal programs and mentions of generous time off and rollover in some cases. This breadth supports a positive view of time-off availability.
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Healthcare Strength — Core medical, dental, and vision coverage is highlighted repeatedly and is viewed as comprehensive for regular full‑time employees. Descriptions such as “good” or “great” benefits reinforce the strength of the health coverage.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) plan with company matching is consistently included as part of the package. The presence of matching contributions strengthens perceived retirement readiness.
Cepheid Insights
What We Do
Cepheid is dedicated to improving healthcare by pioneering molecular diagnostics that combine speed, accuracy, and flexibility. The company's GeneXpert® systems and Xpert® tests automate highly complex and time-consuming manual procedures, providing A Better Way for institutions of any size to perform world-class PCR testing. Cepheid’s broad test portfolio spans respiratory infections, blood virology, women’s and sexual health, TB and emerging infectious diseases, healthcare-associated infectious diseases, oncology and human genetics. The company’s solutions deliver actionable results where they are needed most – from central laboratories and hospitals to near-patient settings. For more information, visit http://www.cepheid.com.
