Vice President, AI, Machine Learning & Data Science

About us

Calyxt (NASDAQ: CLXT) is a plant-based biotechnology platform company focused on delivering innovations that revolutionize how the world uses plants. Calyxt uses its advanced plant-based biotechnology platform to generate innovative, high-value, and sustainable materials and products for world-class and industry leading customers and partners. For more information, go to www.calyxt.com.

Job Summary

The new Vice President of AI, Machine Learning and Data Science is the senior most data science professional in the organization. This individual will lead the data science and AI efforts across the organization and build this program from the ground up. The position reports to Chief Technology Officer.

The successful candidate will bring experience building, leading, and managing teams of data, data science and AI professionals and have successfully deployed and operationalized data science and AI at scale. The team will include data engineers, machine learning engineers, research/optimization engineers and data journalists. In return, Calyxt offers a competitive compensation package with opportunity to participate in the equity program, in a highly dynamic environment focused on bringing disruptive plant-based innovations to market.
 

Key Responsibilities:

• Build a diverse data science team and maintain an inclusive environment
• Mentor team members
• Define overall strategy in partnership with senior executives and peers across the organization
• Make data, data science and AI technology and platform decisions
• Communicate effectively with executives and line-of-business end-users to discover pain points and use cases, lead project definitions, and convey the business value of the project
• Maintain a portfolio of decisions tied to value statements and monitor as metric system to show success of team
• Create self-funded team by generating cost savings and new revenue opportunities.
• Be the external face for data science and AI by presenting externally at relevant conferences and media events
• Provide opportunity for team to maintain their current skills and develop new ones in and out of their domains

As the senior most expert in the company, you will maintain your hands on skills and expertise as well as the relevancy of your skills by staying up to date on current tools, methodologies and processes.

Required Qualifications

Work can be performed from a remote location within continental US or in our headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. If you don't meet all of the listed qualifications, please still consider applying as you may have other skills that would balance things out

• Prior technical executive leadership role
• Deep expertise in at least two of the following: Python, R, Scala or Java. Preference for Python Expert
• Deep expertise in multiple cloud native databases
• Deep expertise consuming and deploying data via APIs
• Deep expertise applying supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised learning techniques
• Deep expertise of Machine Learning pipelines - data ingestion, feature engineering, modeling including ensemble methods, predicting, explaining, deploying and diagnosing over fitting
• Deep expertise in model selection, sampling and hyperparameter optimization
• Mastery of deep learning and neural nets
• Experience combining machine learning and decision optimization or simulations
• Demonstrated business and leadership skills

Preferred Technical and Professional Experience

• Strong analytical skills related to working with unstructured datasets
• Demonstrated examples of root cause analysis on internal and external data and processes that address business questions and improvements
• Experience in team leadership and project management
• Training in design thinking
• PhD, or equivalent in Plant Breeding, Molecular Biology, Genetics, Physics, Computer Science, Statistics or another quantitative field