Senior AI/ML Data Scientist – Natural Language Processing (Hybrid)

Overview

Job Requirements

This posting has been created to pipeline talent for prospective roles that we anticipate will be needed in the future for our organization. By applying to this Pipeline Advertisement you will be submitting your interest to be contacted for future roles similar to what is described in the Pipeline Advertisement.

The Senior AI/ML Data Scientist – Natural Language Processing (NLP) role involves helping to develop and deploy production-grade NLP products for unstructured and semi-structured data from across our company’s research and development pipeline. These models and workflows will help solve real-world problems and contribute to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) in therapeutic research and development. Key focus areas will include the scalable deployment of ML and Generative AI approaches (such as Large Language Models, or LLMs) for surfacing insights from proprietary unstructured research data and biomedical literature, as well as developing fit-for-purpose approaches for the likes of text classification, relation extraction, and entity linking. The position is embedded in a cross-disciplinary team of data scientists, bioinformaticians, and engineers that are all focused on using cutting-edge software, AI/ML, and data science techniques to drive drug discovery and development.

Key responsibilities:
• Staying updated on the newest methods in NLP, ML, and generative AI
• Building novel tools that enable the discovery, development, and delivery of new therapeutics to patients in need
• Understanding real-world challenges and developing automated data solutions for them
• Opportunities to directly interact with users of your data science, ML, and AI products
• Evaluating, developing, testing, and deploying new techniques for natural language understanding
• Freedom to propose projects that interest you and to collaborate cross-functionally on delivery
• Sharing the approaches you implement and their impact with internal company audiences and externally

Additional job details:

The types of datasets we focus on are both internal (e.g., electronic lab notebooks, safety reports, regulatory documents, clinical results) and external (e.g., public literature and Electronic Medical Records). In addition to new tool development, we often consult with some of our 5,000+ stakeholders (scientists, engineers, regulatory liaisons, data scientists, etc.) on their own projects, as well as additional stakeholders from across our company. We strive to enhance data science, NLP, and AI literacy across these groups. As part of our work, we have opportunities to co-author presentations, reports, manuscripts, and/or public code releases.

Work Experience

Education Requirements:
• B.S. with 5 years industry experience focused on NLP, data science, AI/ML/LLM engineering, computer science, semantic engineering or a related discipline
• OR M.S. with 2 years industry experience
• OR PhD in data science, AI/ML/LLM engineering, computer science, semantic engineering or a related discipline

Minimum Requirements:
• 1 year experience with Natural Language Processing, Generative AI or related techniques for machine understanding of natural language (i.e., written text, omics data, or similar)
• 2 years experience with Python, Spark, or related frameworks in AI, machine learning, data science, data engineering or similar context

Preferred skills and experience, not required
• Fluency in Python programming, version control and collaboration with git, environment management (e.g., poetry, conda, docker), standard Python packages (e.g., pandas, numpy, matplotlib), and at least one ML framework (e.g., pytorch, tensorflow, fairseq)
• Experience with scalable data engineering frameworks such as Apache Spark and orchestration frameworks such as Airflow, and/or experience with semantic search and retrieval frameworks (e.g., development and benchmarking of embedding models and retrieval approaches in the context of Retrieval Augmented Generation, RAG)
• Experience with ML model deployment and operations (e.g., DevOps, MLOps, LLMOps), including CI/CD workflows and tooling (e.g., Github actions)
• Experience with standard operations on non-relational (e.g., Elasticsearch/Opensearch, MongoDB, Neptune), relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), and vector databases (e.g., pgvector, Elasticsearch dense vectors) and deployment of APIs and web applications (e.g., flask, fastAPI, django, or dash)
• Working knowledge of statistical learning, such as supervised, unsupervised, and weakly supervised learning, particularly in NLP contexts
• Working knowledge of NLP and/or Generative AI libraries (e.g., regular expressions, spacy, langchain), text annotation tools, and/or semantic frameworks (e.g. RDF triplestores, property graphs, ontology management)
• A demonstrated ability to engage cross-functional teams and stakeholders, including an eagerness to acquire a level of domain knowledge
• Excellent communication, teamwork, didactic, and leadership skills, including skills for scientific communication (authoring scientific articles and presenting) and guidance and mentorship of junior employees and less experienced collaborators

Requisition ID:P-100850

Company:

Merk

Qualifications:

Language requirements:

Specific requirements:

Educational level:

Level of experience (years):

Senior (5+ years of experience)

Tagged as: Classification, Industry, Language Modeling, Language Understanding, NLP, United States