Senior Applied Machine Learning Scientist (Computer Vision)

Working here could change what you want from a job

If you made a list of all the things your perfect job would have, what would be on it? Would it include a mission that truly justified the word “mission?” Would it involve being part of one of the best scientific research and production labs in the world creating petabytes of insight-rich data? Would it be a place filled with smart people all trying to help you do the best work of your career? Would it have leadership that could see an almost science fiction-like future and was looking to you to get there?

Recursion is the clinical-stage biotechnology company industrializing drug discovery by decoding biology. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset the Recursion Map, a collection of hundreds of billions of searchable inferences across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. 

Recursion has been purpose-built to do things that have quite literally never been done before. And while we have resources and an amazing lab, the secret sauce is our people. They are the ones who make big bets and deal in orders of magnitude instead of thinking incrementally, and the result is clear: Eight years ago, we were doing plate manufacturing by hand. Today, we are able to process and scan more than a million experiments every week. 

You’ll be joining Recursion at an interesting time, both for the company and for the world. The global pandemic has reinforced in everyone’s mind not only the importance of therapeutics, but also the critical value that accelerating every phase of drug discovery can provide. For most, the notion that “patients can’t wait” is abstract; COVID-19 has made this concept all too real for millions, even billions, worldwide. Every week, you’ll work hand-in-glove with our data and science teams, turning up to millions of weekly automated wet lab experiments into a map of human biology. 

It is an audacious goal, but it isn’t a dream or science fiction. We’re already doing it.

The Impact You’ll Make

Recursion has the world’s largest proprietary and built-for-purpose biological dataset at 19+ petabytes and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers called BioHive-1. We have a unique approach to phenotypic drug discovery using our inference-based Recursion Map to predict tens of billions of relationships between disease models and therapeutic candidates. This Senior Applied Machine Learning Scientist position offers a unique opportunity to use these data and cutting-edge machine learning techniques to create meaningful representations of biology that will be used to find therapeutics that positively impact patients' lives.

• Design, train, and evaluate deep learning computer vision models. Collaborate with biologists, chemists, automation engineers, data engineers, and other scientists to refine models until they provide a reliable productionized solution.
• Solve challenging biology and drug discovery problems by designing fit-for-purpose ML and statistical models and data splits from our massive in-house cellular imaging datasets. 
• Work with a team of ML engineers and scientists to discover, automate, and streamline ML workflows with a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom tooling as needed.
• Share your work. You will represent Recursion to the scientific community by presenting your work at top conferences and publishing in top scientific journals.

The Team You’ll Join

As a member of the Applied Computer Vision team, you will work closely with other ML scientists and engineers and collaborate cross-functionally with biologists, chemists, data scientists, engineers and product managers in Toronto and Salt Lake City. You will also have the opportunity to collaborate with our research team in Montreal that is housed within the prominent DL research community: Mila.

The Experience You'll Need

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline is required
• 3+ years of work experience in computer vision and deep learning (or 2+ years of work experience for candidates with a Ph.D. degree in a quantitative field): preferably industry experience, including works with real-world computer vision data (not only with benchmark datasets) and model deployment (e.g., model acceleration and compression, etc.)
• Experience applying modern ML and statistical methods to large datasets and reasoning about the outcomes. Experience with microscopy/biomedical imaging data, chemical data, or genomic data is a huge plus. Working knowledge of the drug discovery process is also another plus.
• Having a deep understanding of the theories behind machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision algorithms. Experience in self-supervised learning, image classification, semantic segmentation, and vision transformers is a huge plus. 
• Solid understanding of fundamentals of statistics and statistical analyses
• Strong programming skills, especially with Python. Having knowledge of basic computer data structures and algorithms 
• Ability to implement computer vision algorithms using popular deep learning frameworks such as Pytorch, Tensorflow, and standard libraries such as OpenCV.
• Ability to understand and summarize the latest academic computer vision papers, and select the state-of-the-art algorithm for specific problems
• Experience with publications at computer vision/machine learning conferences (ECCV, ICCV, CVPR, Neurips), or similar impact in the field of deep learning and computer vision.
• Outstanding past projects, publications, and presentations, and a demonstrated ability to communicate results to cross-functional stakeholders. 

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The Values That We Hope You Share:

• We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
• We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
• We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover. 
• Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
• We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.

Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work. You can read more about our values and how we live them every day here.

More About Recursion 

Central to our mission is the Recursion Operating System, or Recursion OS, that combines an advanced infrastructure layer to generate what we believe is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing proprietary biological and chemical datasets and the Recursion Map, a suite of custom software, algorithms, and machine learning tools that we use to explore foundational biology unconstrained by human bias and navigate to new biological insights which may accelerate our programs. We are a biotechnology company scaling more like a technology company. Recursion is proudly headquartered in Salt Lake City. 

Learn more at www.recursion.com, or connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer that values diversity and inclusion.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.