Senior Data Scientist, NGS Applications

Key Skills

Python Programming, NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, Molecular biology

Job Description

We created 13 petabytes of fit-for-purpose biological data. Want to work with it?

When combined with the right algorithms, data can do amazing things: it can encourage strangers to buy something or to click an ad, it can suggest a video or what word might want to use next. Those problems are clearly challenging and interesting, but why not use data science to tackle problems that have plagued humanity for generations: to revolutionize how we recognize and treat disease to directly improve lives and reduce suffering?

Wouldn't that be a career you could be proud of?

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.

As a data scientist at Recursion, you can make an even greater impact on human health and impact more lives than physicians treating one patient at a time. Data scientists at Recursion do science: from designing well-controlled experiments to building models and interpreting results, your skill and expertise can help us infer new compounds and treatments for diseases impacting people around the world.

Beyond the obvious impact you could make, Recursion is designed for data scientists. You will be a part of a team of 30+ data scientists managing 13 petabytes of data, all generated internally and to our specifications’ specifications in an automated lab mere feet from where you work. Beyond scale, the secret sauce is that the data lives as a relatable dataset, fit-for-purpose directly answering complex experimental research questions.

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 science teams, turning +1.5 million weekly automated experiments into a map of human biology.

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

The Impact You'll Make

With treatments for hundreds of diseases in our sights, we’ve built a data science team with domain expertise in computer science, bioinformatics, physics, biology, mathematics, applied statistics, and more. We work side-by-side with biologists, automation scientists, chemists, software engineers, and many others; together, we develop the tools and methods to turn our experimental data into treatments for pathologies that affect the lives of countless individuals.

In this role, you will be a bioinformatics, computational and analytical expert who develops scalable solutions that impact our drug discovery pipeline.

• Strategize in collaboration with biologists, engineers, and data/ML scientists on the next steps for industrializing various stages of the drug discovery process.
• Explore novel metrics, analyses, or models to answer unresolved questions about our data generation processes or downstream applications.
• Deliver scalable software tools for the evaluation and communication of data generated by Recursion’s high-dimensional, high-throughput assay platform.

The Team You’ll Join

You will be joining a fast-growing, cross-functional team with expertise in biology, automation engineering, data science, software engineering, and product development. Your broad area of focus will be multi-omics NGS dataset analysis: developing analyses and building solutions that successfully leverage multi -omics datasets and communicate actionable results to the data science and biology teams. You can expect to be challenged with new scientific domains, high expectations for analytical software development, unresolved questions about analytical methods and applications, and ambitious goals to industrialize various aspects of the drug discovery process. A bold, collaborative, growth-oriented, and team-first mindset will be critical to the success of both individuals and teams in this exceptionally challenging and exciting industry. 

The Experience You’ll Need

• A firm grasp of the fundamentals of probability, statistics, and machine learning.
• 2+ years postdoctoral experience in industry or academia on directly relevant subjects, and/or experience as a technical lead driving execution in these areas.
• Deep understanding of molecular and cell biology and application of next-generation sequencing assays to answer biological questions that accelerate drug discovery
• High fluency with the Python data stack (numpy, pandas, scikit-learn, etc).
• Experience with collaborative software development and peer code review, including version control tools like git.
• Experience developing, releasing, and maintaining software in a continuous-use production environment.
• A track record of outstanding past projects, product development, publications, or presentations.
• Direct experience analyzing next-generation sequencing (NGS) transcriptomics datasets for biomedical research purposes.
• Preferred: direct experience in using NGS datasets in drug discovery

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.

Recursion requires all employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 prior to their first date of employment.