Senior Machine Learning Engineer, ML Platform

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 1.8 million+ weekly automated 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

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will be building a platform that accelerates drug discovery with machine learning.  By leveraging your experience in machine learning, software engineering, infrastructure, and data, you will:

• Partner with peers, product, and customers across organizational and functional boundaries to discover, automate, and streamline ML workflows with a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom tooling as needed
• Transfer research ideas into production and improve the efficiency of our models
• Design, build and improve the infrastructure and abstractions to support our evolving research needs
• Deploy, monitor, and optimize DL models in a continuous-use, high-throughput, biological research platform that executes millions of custom cellular experiments weekly
• Steer the direction for ML tooling, improve technical standard  and advocate for best practices
• Inspire your team and stakeholders alike to find the best outcome by facilitating constructive dialogue, reconciling perspectives into a unified view

The Team You’ll Join 

Recursion has built a unique dataset (over 1 million unique biological perturbations profiled in a high-dimensional biological assay, making up nearly 13 PB of highly-relatable data) and 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.

You will join a team of software and machine learning engineers working to standardize and automate the process of training, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models.  We are expanding the ML applications we support and maximizing the use of our supercomputer.  The capabilities you provide to machine learning scientists will allow them to have increased understanding of our models and move them into production with confidence.

The Experience You’ll Need

• Experience with statistical modeling and/or designing and building large distributed systems with elegant interfaces that can scale easily
• Proficient in the full lifecycle of ML and software development in production, including:
  • Data preparation & validation, model training, evaluation, validation, and monitoring
  • Optimizing, releasing, and maintaining ML products
  • Authoring well tested, easily maintained, scalable, documented code, peer reviews, CI/CD
• Ability to own projects in a collaborative open environment
• A mentor, coach, and sponsor to peers and colleagues
• Nice to haves: PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, Horovod, GCP, Hybrid Cloud, Linux, CUDA, Docker, Kubernetes, BigQuery

#LI-BW1

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.

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.