Director of Data Science

Key Skills

Bioinformatics, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery - CI/CD, Data science techniques, Data Visualization, Machine learning techniques, Nextflow, Snakemake

Job Description

A Bit About Us:

We are Arcadia Science. Arcadia is a science company founded and led by scientists. Our mission is to transform evolutionary innovations into real-world solutions by openly developing more efficient, replicable, and sustainable ways to leverage the biology of diverse organisms.

The Opportunity:

We are seeking an extraordinary and experienced Director of Data Science to join our team to lead the expansion of data science at Arcadia. Our ideal candidate is a strong manager and proven leader of fast-paced growing organizations with a demonstrable bias toward taking action. We are looking for someone who can think deeply about how best to integrate software engineering/ML and life science research to move towards more efficient and predictive modes in biology. We prefer candidates who have an understanding of how to leverage an evolutionary framework to identify interesting trends across biology and approach this with an engineering mindset. We are also looking for a highly motivated and collaborative systems thinker who understands how to scale a team and a computational discipline. This person will help us develop structures and processes as we scale to an organization of approximately 150 people over the next five years. While you are able to lead a team on a project and delegate work effectively, you are not above rolling up your sleeves to do the hard work yourself as we build. You will quickly gather information and apply your keen eye for detail to help prioritize needs and make critical decisions. You should be a strong communicator, as you will be leading discussions with a wide range of stakeholders across the organization. Top candidates will have extensive experience building data science teams within a scientific research environment. Additionally, top candidates will have fluency in multiple coding languages (e.g. R, bash, Python), and will easily adapt to conducting analyses on different computational infrastructures such as AWS cloud computing. Given our goal of making our tools as open as possible while respecting the licenses of the underlying software and our translational goals, open source software experience is a big plus. You can learn more about our approach to computing at Arcadia here and check our existing projects on GitHub.

Responsibilities

• Hire and manage a team of data scientists to create digital solutions that package algorithms, data science workflows, and data assets into user-friendly experiences for our R&D teams.
• Build proof of concept tools or pipelines and mock-up visualizations to test and validate hypotheses.
• Innovate algorithms, methods, and workflows, and translate them into reusable software.
• Define requirements for new computational methods and software based on the needs of stakeholders.
• Leverage computational biology, machine learning, and bioinformatics skills to both spur and implement research projects.
• Evaluate commercial and open source tools, incorporating them into our software strategy.
• Collaborate with scientific project teams to design research directions.
• Provide data, digital, and analytical support to discovery and early development projects to inform the data, digital, and analytical roadmap for R&D.
• Mentor employees to ensure team and divisional objectives are on-track or accelerated.

Education /Experience

• BA/BS in computer science, engineering, bioinformatics, mathematics, or a related field.
• General understanding of evolutionary and molecular biology.
• Track record of building high performing teams of software engineers, data scientists and computational biologists.
• Hands-on experience working with complex, biological datasets.
• Expertise in at least one programming language, with a willingness to adapt and learn new languages as needed.
• Experience in developing digital experiences that impact data analysis, such as workflow automation (Nextflow, Snakemake), data visualization, and API development.
• Experience with open-source software and contributing to open-source projects.
• Experience with software engineering practices (using version control, CI/CD pipelines etc.).
• Experience with using and training ML models.
• Previous startup experience.

Interested applicants should send a resume and a one-page cover letter which includes:

• A brief narrative of your professional background, highlighting accomplishments in building data science teams.
• A description of how you would approach data science in a growing scientific startup.

The expected salary range is $250,000-$350,000 per year with generous equity and benefits, depending on experience level.