Hiring a Lead Data Scientist and Python Software Engineers - Recursion Pharmaceuticals - Salt Lake City, Utah
(Also hiring biologists with mammalian cell culture experience!)
We’re a fast-growing 7-person biotech startup with an amazing set of advisors including the Broad’s Anne Carpenter, and we're using high throughput experiments, automated image segmentation and analysis of human cells, and data analysis to find new treatments for rare genetic diseases faster than anyone has previously thought possible. There are more than 5,000 rare genetic diseases, in total affecting millions of Americans, and our serious goal is to find treatments for 100 rare diseases in the next 10 years.
Our approach is to model rare genetic diseases in human cells, then use these disease models to find drugs that revert the cells to a healthy state, and thus are strong candidates for impacting the disease in patients. In a pretty quick experiment, we image millions of human cells. Image segmentation and analysis quickly makes thousands of measurements, resulting in a very deep quantitation of the state of every single cell. The challenge at hand is running the right experiments in the right way and analyzing results to make the discoveries we seek.
I previously co-founded BuildASign.com, a bootstrapped custom printing ecommerce business set to do over $70M in 2014 revenues, and I left daily operations several years back to study biology, bioinformatics, machine learning and drug discovery. My co-founder, Chris, and I started Recursion to turn drug discovery into a computational problem. Our vision is ambitious (zero-to-one scale), and early results are compelling.
 Lead Data Scientist (Python):
- You have several years of experience in statistics, machine learning, and software development solving problems using lots of data, preferably using python’s scientific stack. You see the world through the lens of statistics and modeling, you thoroughly understand cross-validation and learning curves, and you can explore data on your own and get an effective guess as to what sort of model and assumptions make sense as a starting point.
- You’re motivated both by tackling the most challenging data problems around, and by making lots of patients’ lives dramatically better.
- Maybe you already know some biology, but if you don’t, you’re excited to learn what you need to (we’ll help, of course!) in order to really understand our data and approach.
- You’ll come to understand our experiments and data at a visceral level and help us guide the direction of our experiments and our company towards our goals.
- You’ll work with our biologists to guide our design/experiment/analyze cycle towards getting the most impactful biological information from the most rapid and cost-effective experimental approaches. This includes researching, suggesting and testing different statistical and machine learning approaches, along with changing our experimental setup to provide more useful information with every round of experiments. You’ll set the groundwork for how we’ll design and analyze thousands of experiments in the coming years.
 Software Engineer (Python):
- You have several years of experience in python software development, preferably using ipython and other scientific python tools. You’re also super-comfortable at the command line and handling the standard a linux server, and great at solving any kind of computational issue via stackoverflow. No sysadmins, DBAs or the like will be around to help for a while.
- You’re motivated by challenging problems, and by the idea of making millions of patients’ lives dramatically better, as fast as we can.
- You’ll work with biologists and data scientists to develop tools to manage and automate our experiments and analyses. To manage the experiments and analyses it will take to treat 100 diseases in 10 years, we’ll need a pretty amazing set of systems in place eventually, but need to get there incrementally so that we can make rapid progress immediately using the resources we have.
 About Recursion:
We work in a beautiful office and lab space set directly at the base of the mountains, overlooking Salt Lake City, situated directly one floor above the drug discovery core at the University of Utah, giving us direct access to millions of dollars of cutting edge lab automation and imaging equipment. We offer competitive pay, health insurance, relocation assistance (working at the office is part of the deal), equity, a location 30 minutes from amazing mountains and 5 world-class ski resorts, and a group of ambitious, talented, happy, awesome people to work with.
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2014)