Director of Data Analytics

About Exscientia

Exscientia is an AI-driven pharmatech company committed to discovering, designing and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia developed the first-ever functional precision oncology platform to successfully guide treatment selection and improve patient outcomes in a prospective interventional clinical study, as well as to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting. Our pipeline demonstrates our ability to rapidly translate scientific concepts into precision-designed therapeutic candidates, with more than 25 projects underway. By designing better drugs, faster, we believe the best ideas of science can rapidly become the best medicines for patients.

As the Associate Director of Data Analytics in the Discovery Informatics group at Exscientia you will play a central role in developing and exploring the application of innovative data- and workflows. Reporting to the VP of Discovery Informatics you will provide both thought leadership and hands-on software and data engineering. You will also make direct personal contributions, using your machine learning and data science skills to advance our decision support and predictive capabilities to the next level.

You Have The Opportunity To:

• Grow professionally through work on challenging data science problems.
• Research tough data acquisition, integration and semantic search technologies and couple these to novel predictive or classification models.
• Scan external technology development to ensure the use of best-in-class tools and approaches.
• Perform analyses on key datasets, and provide interpretation and advice on implications of analyses.
• Continuously innovate to improve on our existing machine learning capabilities.
• Help define Discovery Informatics data, tool, and product, strategy as well as plan and oversee delivery of key projects.
• Engage with key stakeholders across the business to understand business needs and help deliver data science projects to teams across and outside of Exscientia.
• Regularly discuss and present your work to peers, senior stakeholders and external collaborators.
• Mentor team members and provide expert internal consulting on areas of deep expertise.
• Work closely with the leadership to align work with corporate strategy and needs and report progress toward delivery goals.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience within AI/ML sector.
• Domain knowledge of AI/ML in the setting of drug discovery, medicine bioinformatics, or cheminformatics, and its application in the wider drug discovery setting.
• Domain knowledge of key data resources to support drug discovery.
• Significant experience in programming in python.
• Expert knowledge of a modern data science/analytics stack, including modern ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, MLOps technologies (MLFlow, AutoML), modern workflow tools and collaborative data science environments (e.g. Jupyter notebooks).
• Expertise in NER/NLP, preferably with experience in key biomedical lexicons and ontologies.
• Strong technical data science analytical and visualising skills for analyzing large and complex multi-dimensional data sets.
• A structured approach to data engineering, documentation, and requirements gathering.
• Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills: you will need to be able to communicate effectively with team members as well as external audiences having diverse professional backgrounds.

What would be great to have?

• Knowledge of NER, NLP and associated technologies/tools, e.g. BERT.
• Knowledge of text mining and natural language processing techniques for extracting knowledge from documents.
• Experience in building of accessible query front ends for datasets.

Benefits

• Work together to make a positive contribution to patients by revolutionising the pharmaceutical industry through AI-driven discovery.
• We will work with you to kick-start or further grow your career – from funding for professional development and conference attendance. To the opportunity to acquire valuable skills, work on problems that matter, and learn from world-class technological and scientific leaders.
• Opportunity to join an inclusive, collaborative and intellectually stimulating culture.
• We will work with you to provide a highly competitive compensation as we continue to grow and thrive.
• Our team’s health and well-being is important to us we offer a generous holiday allowance, provide flexible working and remote working to encourage all of our team to manage their own work, time and life along with wellbeing and mindfulness support.
• When you are in the office, you will have access to a kitchen stocked with an endless supply of food for all employees. Along with access plenty of break out areas so you can get to know the people you are working with. Some of the best ideas start with a coffee break!
• Hear from our team why they enjoy working here