Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Science

The Team

The mission of the CZI Science Initiative is to support the science and technology that will help make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. We support interdisciplinary teams of physicians, biologists, computational scientists, and engineers to expand our understanding of the human body and illness — the very science behind medicine. CZI fosters collaboration between scientists and engineers, develops tools and technologies, and builds support for basic scientific research. Our current focus is on understanding the mysteries of the cell, the fundamental building block of life. To that end, our approach in the Science Technology group is to digitally model cell function through research, advanced development, partnerships, and funding.

Some Science Initiative efforts include:

• Building software such as 
  • CZ CELLxGENE - a rich data platform with interfaces that enable any computational or biological expert to understand the molecular function of cells and tissues.
  • CZ ID - a metagenomics platform that delivers insights in infectious disease.
  • napari-hub - a site to discover image analysis methods.
• Funding of
  • Single cell biology and the application of technologies that enable multi-omics investigation at the level of cells.
  • Imaging and developing tools capable of observing biological processes across spatial scales at the level of tissues, cells, and proteins.
  • Neurodegeneration and bringing new ideas and new people into the field, to look at this problem from a cross-disease perspective.
• Doing science through
  • The CZ Biohub empowering scientists to work on their riskiest, most exciting ideas.

The CZ Imaging Institute and developing technologies to image the molecular architecture of the cell with atomic resolution

What You'll Do

As an Engineer on the  AI/ML team you will apply and optimize state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve important problems in the biomedical sciences aligned with CZI’s mission. You will work as part of a team responsible for developing and deploying ML models that use data developed by CZI and research partners all for the purpose of contributing to greater understanding of human cell function.

You will have the opportunity to work closely with teams of scientists, computational biologists, engineers within CZI and to collaborate with CZI grantees, with CZ institutes, and other external labs and organizations. Your work will inspire and enhance the production and analysis of datasets by CZ teams and collaborators. Scientific focus areas could include single cell biology, imaging, genomics, and proteomics.

• Working with the ML Research Scientists, iterate on, optimize, deploy, and maintain innovative machine learning models, systems, and software tools that enable the analysis and interpretation of complex biology data sets and natural language.
• Work with the cross-functional team members to quickly iterate on system performance to meet/stay ahead of users’ needs - e.g. we get feedback that the model doesn't scale to X million so working with our user researcher/scientist/product team to iterate on the solution. 
• May be involved in data pipelining work to clean, manage, and version data to ensure that the Research Scientist has access to reproducible data. 
• Serve as an interface to product teams to understand how models may need to evolve to support multiple use cases.

What You'll Bring

• Enjoy working in a highly interactive and cross-functional collaborative environment with a diverse team of colleagues and partners in leading-edge cell biology data-driven research.
• A track record and expertise in developing AI/ML models for large scale  clusters of CPUs and GPUs, using techniques of distributing load, scheduling computation, optimizing AI/ML code, fine tuning models,  deploying for batch/endpoint inference, and generally taking full advantage of the computational infrastructure.
• A good working knowledge of Python-based ML  libraries and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, NumPy, Pandas, and Scikit-learn.
• Expertise in using modern frameworks for distributed computing and infrastructure management, particularly as related to ML models, (e.g. Apache Spark, High Performance Compute (HPC), Distributed Tensorflow, etc)
• Have a Masters in computer science with a focus on machine learning & data analytics, or equivalent industry experience and at least 3-5 years of experience developing and applying machine learning methods.
• A good working knowledge of general software engineering practices in a production environment.
• The ability to work independently and as part of a team, and have excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $190,000- $285,000.00. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process. Pay ranges outside Redwood City are adjusted based on cost of labor in each respective geographical market. Your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your location during the hiring process.