Overview
Company
AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines for some of the world’s most serious diseases. But we’re more than one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. At AstraZeneca, we’re proud to have a unique workplace culture that inspires innovation and collaboration. Here, employees are empowered to express diverse perspectives and are made to feel valued, energized and rewarded for their ideas and creativity.
Department – AI Strategy & Innovation
The AI Strategy & Innovation Team is a global team of highly experienced, skilled AI engineers and professionals, passionate about delivering state of the art services and products within R&D IT.
AI has the potential to transform every step of the R&D pipeline. Through recent advancements in technology we are now collecting trillions of points of data, and have the opportunity to harness that data for analytics… and insight that will lead to a new generation of medicines that are capable of addressing the world’s most challenging unmet medical needs. The mission of our team is to transform the way the R&D uses data, analytics and AI to discover and develop medicines. In order to achieve this we partner with scientific teams to deliver cutting-edge capabilities, products and platforms that enable scientists to accelerate medicines that are safe and effective for patients.
Role
We have an exciting opportunity for a dynamic, technical machine learning leader to join our growing AI Strategy & Innovation team as Principal Engineer for the Deep Learning Team. The deep learning team focuses on applying state of the art AI approaches to AstraZeneca’s data (especially imaging) to derive new insights, unlock predictive power, and automate expensive cognitive processes. We accomplish this by training models to encode complex data, such as CT scans and whole slide images, as embeddings – numerical vectors that capture the essential characteristics of the similarities and differences between the data; we the reuse the trained models to generate embeddings for new datasets, enabling a host of downstream applications, such as annotating and exploring data, and predicting patient outcomes.
In this role, you’ll own the technical delivery and implementation of our internal deep learning capabilities.
In addition, this role will be the site leader for AI Strategy & Innovation in Barcelona. You will build a community of data experts, driving team cohesion, engagement, morale and sharing of best practice – making it both high performing and a great place to work.
Competitive candidates will have a proven track record of delivering deep learning applications, bringing excellent technical oversight and development of the best coding and engineering practices for the team.
Key Accountabilities
• Work closely with Product Lead for Deep Learning to build a roadmap and vision for our capability build that meets key strategic R&D needs.
• Drive clear communications, accountability across the team and effective ways of working.
• Prioritize (from technical perspective) backlog features with the Product Lead and Project Manager and key stakeholders
• Drive technical direction and architectural decisions for Deep Learning, ensuring we have the right technology to enable data scientists and AI engineers to work efficiently and accurately
• Drive the Deep Learning engineering roadmap, in line with the scientific vision
• Remain up to date with machine learning literature and modelling approaches. Actively participate in both internal and external opportunities to publish and present progress of the Deep Learning team.
• Work closely with project managers and Product Lead to optimize platform budgets and work alongside aligned projects to ensure provision of balanced and appropriate skillsets in delivery teams.
• Be a champion for high-standards to ensure best practice is developed in the Deep Learning team
• Coach, mentor and develop other members of the team, lead and inspire and be a key part of their development and retention.
• Build and support the Deep Learning team through hiring, coaching, mentoring, feedback and hands-on career development
• Design and implement technical solutions across the full stack
• Research and develop state-of-the-art machine learning models to optimize model performance on a range of biomedical prediction tasks.
• Advocate and advance modern, agile development practices and help develop and evangelize a great engineering culture
• Be able to write excellent code with proper unit, functional, and integration tests for code to ensure quality.
Candidate Knowledge, Skills and Experience
• Doctorate degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics or related subjects – or Masters in a relevant discipline and exceptional machine learning skills.
• Significant experience and proven deep technical skills in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, natural language processing or computer vision.
• Application of deep learning techniques in a life sciences context, and in particular clinical imaging.
• Experience with one or more DL frameworks such as Tensorflow or PyTorch.
• Experience with scientific and machine learning libraries e.g., SciPy, Scikit-learn, NumPy.
• Strong software development skills. Proficiency in Python preferred.
• Experience building large scale data processing pipelines.
• Experience with Cloud computing, Hadoop/Spark, SQL.
• Exposure to ML Ops principles
• Exposure to Knowledge Graph/graph technologies
• Proven experience leading a team
• Ability to explain and present analyses and machine learning concepts to a broad audience.
• Ability to work with loosely defined objectives and turning these into concrete machine learning problems.
• Experience in software engineering and machine learning best practices, including version control, continuous integration (CI) and continuous development (CD), containerization, and shell scripting.
• Background or interest in biology or medicine.
• Relevant scientific publications in AI/ML (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, among others), computational biology or bioinformatics venues.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Excellent teamwork and collaboration skills
• Creative, collaborative, & product focused.
We consider individuals in this role to be able to be partner with science and IT leadership in setting the strategic direction while being able to discuss details with engineering and operational teams to ensure that delivery activity is focussed on the right priorities. This means you need to be capable of working in multiple spaces and be able to bring different parties within and outside your group together to agree on the direction and cadence of execution. You will raise expectations within the whole team, enable them to solve complex technical problems and work alongside complementary delivery platforms while aligning solutions with scientific and data strategies and target architecture.
You should apply if
• You have life sciences experience, particularly leading data engineering, data science or machine learning teams.
• You are technically competent and curious, with a passion to explore, iterate, fail, and learn.
• You are able to write high-quality code with proper unit, functional, and integration tests, and drive best practices and standards through teams.
• You are customer-focused, success is measured by how well your team is delivering against requirements
• You know what good looks like for a high-performing team of engineers and know how to get there
• You understand the importance of sustainability and are comfortable to have trade off conversations around technical debt
• You share a passion for enabling and developing your teams to achieve and exceed their personal career objectives.
AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements
Company:
10001254 – Associate Director AI Scientist
Qualifications:
Language requirements:
Specific requirements:
Educational level:
Level of experience (years):
Senior (5+ years of experience)
