Machine Learning Engineer - Montreal

About Valence Labs

Valence Labs is an AI research and productization engine within Recursion dedicated to industrializing scientific discovery to radically improve lives. Combining the intellectual freedom of academia with the resources and stability of industry, our focus is the development of highly-autonomous systems that will spearhead a fundamental shift in the way treatments are discovered and developed for complex disease. Our research is driven by optimism, purpose, and a shared vision for a healthier tomorrow. We publish in top journals and conferences, are deeply committed to open-science and open-source, and maintain some of the largest and most active research communities in our industry. Our team is located in London and Montreal, where we share close connections with Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute.

About the role

We’re seeking an experienced Machine Learning Engineers to shape and lead the development of software and AI systems that will help in our mission of industrializing scientific discovery to radically improve lives. We're looking for individuals with strong engineering skills, including expertise in designing, implementing, improving, and deploying distributed machine learning systems at significant scale. In addition, we highly value proficiency with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and exceptional problem-solving skills. In this role, you will:

• Collaborate and contribute to Valence Labs’ research agenda such as novel ML methods to accelerate drug discovery.
• Work across units to support existing projects, providing both research insights and engineering solutions.
• Handle data wrangling, filtering, and preprocessing for various data types, including omics, sequential, imaging, molecular and simulation data.
• Collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of dry and wet lab scientists to inform and improve our models and systems.
• Engage with and contribute to open-source libraries developed by Valence and the research community.

A successful candidate will have most of the following:

• PhD or Master's degree with industry experience.
• Proven track record in machine learning, including designing new architectures, hands-on experimentation, analysis, visualization, and model deployment.
• Strong programming skills and understanding of modern software development practices, especially in Python and PyTorch.
• Experience in building and deploying high-performance implementations of deep learning algorithms.
• Experience with some of the types of data used at Recursion: phenomic imaging, DNA sequencing, transcriptomics, molecular graphs, protein structures, biological databases, and quantum mechanics simulations.
• Demonstrated capability to understand and reverse engineer existing solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, high adaptability, motivated and a team player attitude.
• Desire to learn and understand complex scientific questions related to physics, chemistry, and biology.
• Passion for applying ML research to impactful problems with the aim of improving human health.

Nice to have:

• Authorship of publications in peer-reviewed conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or similar).
• Contribution to high-visibility ML codebases.
• Scientific knowledge of biology, chemistry, or physics with previous experience working in a scientific environment across disciplines.

Valence Labs is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, where understanding and accommodating personal needs and preferences is a priority. Join our multidisciplinary team of passionate researchers, eager to push the boundaries of ML research and contribute to industrializing scientific discovery to radically improve lives.