Job Summary:
Genentech is a leading biotechnology company focused on innovative healthcare solutions. They are seeking a Senior or Principal Machine Learning Scientist to drive the development of internal reasoning Large Language Models for drug discovery tasks, working at the intersection of engineering and research.
Responsibilities:
• Lead the design and evolution of scientific reasoning systems, setting technical direction for model architectures, training strategies, and evaluation methodologies.
• Define and execute approaches to systematically improve model performance on scientific tasks, including long-horizon reasoning and complex decision-making.
• Translate biological and chemical domain knowledge into machine learning objectives, training signals, and evaluation criteria, working closely with domain experts.
• Architect and improve large-scale distributed machine learning systems, ensuring robustness, efficiency, and reproducibility across training and evaluation workflows.
• Partner with researchers and cross-functional teams to move models from research prototypes to production-ready systems that support active discovery programs.
• Translate high-level research goals into robust training code.
• Own the end-to-end integrity of large-scale training runs, from data orchestration to the development of rigorous reasoning benchmarks.
• Act as a technical mentor to junior staff and interns, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and rapid experimentation.
• Help define the long-term technical roadmap for scientific reasoning models, identifying new opportunities and setting priorities across initiatives.
• Architect new initiatives that integrate diverse data modalities, guiding the technical direction of cross-functional projects across gRED.
• Serve as a key technical authority for leadership, influencing how Genentech leverages generative AI to solve high-stakes problems in the therapeutic pipeline.
Qualifications:
Required:
• PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field.
• For Senior (SE6): 0 – 2+ years of industry or post-doc experience with a focus on deep learning.
• For Principal (SE7): 5+ years of industry or post-PhD experience with a demonstrated track record of technical leadership and project ownership.
• Extensive experience developing and training large-scale machine learning models, including approaches to improve domain understanding, reasoning capabilities, and model alignment.
• A strong history of research excellence at top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
• Strong software engineering skills and experience designing and operating large-scale or high-performance machine learning systems.
Preferred:
• Experience with molecular modalities (e.g., protein sequences, chemical graphs, and structured molecular data) is highly valued but not required.
• A public portfolio of research or significant contributions to open-source ML libraries.
• A passion for applying frontier AI to drug discovery.
Company:
Genentech is a biotechnology research company that specializes in genetic testing and personalized medicines. Founded in 1976, the company is headquartered in South San Francisco, USA, with a team of 10001+ employees. The company is currently Late Stage.