Machine Learning Research Scientist

Who We Are
Vial's vision is to empower scientists to cure all human disease. Vial was founded on a mission to reimagine clinical trials and deliver faster and more efficient trials for sponsors. Through our end to end technology platform, we are delivering on a generational opportunity to make trials radically more efficient.
Vial’s co-founders (Simon Burns and Andrew Brackin) were early team members at $1B+ startups Robinhood, Opendoor and Newfront. Our early team is made up of experienced technology and operations leaders from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Faire, Chime and other leading technology companies.
Vial was founded in Oct 2020 and has grown the team to over 100 across the business. Come join us on our adventure to reimagine clinical trials.
Overview
Join Vial, a company with a mission to empower scientists to cure all human diseases, and be a part of a team that will revolutionize all stages of drug discovery in an AI-first approach.
Vial has developed technology to dramatically reduce the cost of clinical trials and is already running multiple trials. Now, we are building a world-class team of scientists and engineers to completely reshape drug discovery with this new reality of clinical trials cost. As one of the pioneering members of this organization, you will play a meaningful role in building a team that embodies an inspiring, collaborative and entrepreneurial culture. Our mission is build drug discovery engine that will bring an order of magnitude more drugs to market than any other drug discovery company.
As a Research Scientist, your role will involve building machine learning based models and algorithms that will scale across programs and phases of drug discovery. You will work in a highly creative, fast-paced and interdisciplinary environment, collaborating with leading engineers and scientists. Vial will see drug from conception to patient, and you will have the chance to work at all stages of the project. Your contributions will be critical to the organization's success and will draw upon your research experience, as well as allow you to learn from those around you, to apply novel techniques and ideas to newly encountered computational biology and chemistry problems.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with team members on building ML models for predicting molecular properties, proposing new molecules, and modifying molecules
• Conduct original research in topics such as large language models (LLMs), geometric deep learning, and Bayesian optimization
• Build drug discovery systems with software engineers and computational chemists, helping oversee programs to cure diseases
• Iteratively scale, rethink, and collaborate on a drug discovery engine that will scale to hundreds of programs
• Work with other scientists, clinicians, computational chemists, project managers, and external partners to accomplish our mission of curing diseases

What You'll Bring

• PhD or equivalent experience in computer science/machine learning
• Basic knowledge of chemistry
• Peer-reviewed publications or conference proceedings in a related area
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, especially for non-experts
• A passion for curing diseases

The base salary range is $125,000 - $185,000 annually, based on a local (San Francisco) hire. Final offer amount will depend on education, skills, experience, and location.
#LI-Remote
Why You’ll Love Working At Vial
We are innately curious. We found our calling in clinical trials after learning the pain points directly. It is our curiosity that propels us to keep building, finding new challenges, and fulfilling our vision of reimagining clinical trials.We believe in autonomy. Team members do their best work when given autonomy. In order to make an impact on the scale of the Vial vision, we built our culture to enable each Vial team member to feel ownership of their domain. We take pride in building mastery. We believe in building master in a craft. Craftsmanship, a pride in one’s craft, is key to prolonged engagement on a difficult challenge. Vial’s culture is one of highly autonomous, deeply focused experts working on an immensely hard problem together.Our strength is moving fast and staying humble. We believe that if we build a team that is intellectually honest, that we stay nimble and keep an open mind to all solutions - we’ll be adaptive and solve the problems that face us at every turn.
BenefitsCompetitive Equity CompensationHealth, Dental, and VisionRemote-First Paid Parental LeaveUnlimited Vacation