Vice President, Head of Machine Learning

About Montai: 

What if… you could join an organization that creates, resources, and builds life sciences companies that invent breakthrough technologies in order to transform health care and sustainability?

Montai Health is a privately held, early-stage biotechnology company developing a platform for understanding and leveraging complex molecular interactions within organisms to solve global challenges in human health and sustainability. The company leverages a multidisciplinary approach that integrates tools ranging from machine learning and big data to multi-omics and high-throughput screening.

At Montai, we nurture a bold, spirited and leading-edge culture dedicated to strengthening human health:

• We are one team with omnidirectional trust, empowered and accountable
• We are strong as individuals but stronger as a team and we are committed to excellence
• We have a sense of urgency and persistence and we are crazily confident that we can make a difference
• We need to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and be rigorous and we recognize that failure is data
• We care for diversity in people, thought, personality, opinions, background and distinctiveness
• We have a sense of humor to help us manage through our strategic noise

The Role:

Montai Therapeutics is seeking a hands-on, experienced, creative, and visionary VP, Head of Machine Learning. This person will be responsible for leading the strategy and design of Montai’s machine learning platform for small molecule discovery (CONECTA™) as well as leading a team of machine learning scientists and engineers to build and operate the platform. The role offers a unique opportunity to apply chemical machine learning to a highly diverse and unique chemical space of compounds with a history of human consumption using a biology-first approach to increase the probability of success of finding compounds against hard-to-drug targets. This position is ideal for a highly cross-functional leader with deep expertise in machine learning and computational chemistry with experience in drug discovery.

Successful candidates will be able to thrive in a fast-paced, action-oriented, team environment and display a clear passion for science and impact. The candidate must be an entrepreneurial, highly motivated and purpose-driven leader who is able to work and communicate effectively across machine learning, biology, and chemistry teams, as well as externally with partners in both technology and pharma. They must exhibit excellent leadership, project management, and strong collaboration and communication skills and lead breakthrough method development in a dynamic and innovative environment.

Responsibilities

• Ensure the CONECTA™ platform successfully predicts compound bioactivity and critical ADMET/physicochemical properties, leading to safe and effective therapeutics
• Lead CONECTA™ ML strategy, design, and implementation, including the development of next-generation pathway modeling technologies
• Identify new technologies and areas of applied research that can further the platform and understand the competitive landscape
• Develop and lead a team of machine learning scientists and engineers
• Work closely with Data Science, Chemistry, and Biology groups to support pipeline programs and platform-development / data generation activities, coordinating on project planning and prioritization to ensure clear communication
• Coordinate and build external research collaborations with industry and academic partners, including the publication of research results
• Represent Montai with pharma partners and investors
• Advise the leadership team on staff and resource needs, organizational planning, and technology development

Qualifications

• PhD in in machine learning, computational biology, computational chemistry, statistics, computer science, mathematical modeling, operations research, or related fields
• 10+ years leadership experience in machine learning, computational chemistry / biology, or other related areas, ideally with a track record in small molecule drug discovery
• Excellent communication skills across disparate technical domains and with business leaders
• Expert domain knowledge of ML applications in computational chemistry, computational biology, and biological foundation models
• Expertise in working with biological and chemical datasets, and familiarity with the principles behind high throughput screening, gene expression profiling, cell imaging, and other biological data modalities.
• Expertise in multiple relevant ML model architectures applied to biological and chemical data including graph convolutional models, transformers, and diffusion models
• Expertise in multiple relevant software frameworks including pytorch, kubernetes, MLFlow, ray, and ML workflow orchestrators such as redun, nextflow, or dagster
• Experience with ML Ops, including distributed training and prediction; and modern software engineering practices such as version control, code reviews, unit testing, and continuous integration

Flagship Pioneering and our ecosystem companies are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Flagship Pioneering and its affiliated Flagship Lab companies (collectively, “FSP”) do not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to FSP or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Flagship Pioneering’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of FSP, and FSP will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.