Human data before the clinic

Vivodyne accelerates the successful discovery, design, and development of human therapeutics through the convergence of novel biology, robotics, and AI. Our platform enables customers to massively de-risk drug candidates by testing them against functional, lab-grown, human organs and multi-organ systems. We conduct preclinical discovery and clinical development campaigns to generate new therapeutics and clinical strategies from these proprietary, physiologically-realistic human organ tissues at unprecedented scale, speed, and quality through automation and machine learning. We're financially backed by some of the most selective and successful venture funds, and several "top 10" global pharmaceutical innovators have already partnered with us to strengthen and speed their therapeutic pipelines.

To learn more visit us at www.vivodyne.com.

Role

The AI Team at Vivodyne has the opportunity to employ and advance cutting edge research on some of the hardest and most interesting problems in science and engineering — with access to exceptionally feature-rich, consistent, and massive-scale Vivodyne human tissue imagery to empower this work. We are building a portfolio of AI technologies to automate the discovery, development, and de-risking of novel therapies using our unique technology platform, including single-cell 3D phenomics/machine vision, multimodal (multi-omic) translation, and reinforcement learning for robotic planning & study design among our tech portfolio. As the Director of AI Bioinformatics you will lead the hands-on development, deployment, and operation of state-of-the-art AI-driven image processing and bioinformatics pipelines that extract comprehensive features from our industry-leading imagery and multi-omics datasets.

Responsibilities

Meet directly with internal and external stakeholders to understand their scientific objectives, and work backward from these objectives to innovate and build advanced analytics solutions that fully leverage the capabilities of the Vivodyne imaging and multi-omics platforms to deliver maximally useful scientific results.
Apply your background in AI/ML, applied mathematics, algorithms, cellular biology, and confocal microscopy, and your familiarity with sample preparation methods and their various strengths and limitations, to develop state-of-the-art techniques in image processing to accurately determine the structure and function of cellular tissue features.
Build, develop and lead an exceptional group of team members, inspiring them to accomplish greatness in AI Bioinformatics while simultaneously creating a culture of operational excellence.
Work within a greater team adhering to established software architecture, MLOps, coding, and documentation standards, contributing to the growth of our carefully designed codebase while leveraging our high coding standards to accelerate your teams productivity.
In designing and implementing compute pipelines, emphasize modularity, composability, and performance efficiency. Use existing container orchestration frameworks rather than writing custom platforms. Leverage open source solutions whenever possible.
Embrace and foster a culture committed to taking full advantage of cloud computing on AWS.
Deeply understand and provide continuous feedback on the performance of our imaging systems. Communicate and collaborate cross-functionally with tissue engineers as well as microfluidics and robotics engineers to identify opportunities to advance our scientific and engineering platforms.
Drive robust and effective communication and collaboration throughout our distributed team.
Work toward an in-depth understanding of the detailed physiology and pathophysiology of Vivodyne's tissue models, and apply this understanding toward the realization of customers' scientific objectives.

The role demands leadership, passion for biology, customer obsession, technical excellence, a mindset for personal, organizational and technical scaling, exceptional organizational and communications skills, attention to detail, and a fearless willingness to innovate where no one has before.

Requirements and Expectations

Scientific excellence. You keep your "saw" sharp, staying on top of relevant trends, research, developments, innovations, and the state-of-the-art in your field both inside and outside the company. You have a breadth of understanding across multiple disciplines (AI/ML, multi-omics, applied mathematics, scientific software design, algorithms, cellular biology, confocal microscopy) and acquire additional expertise as needed. You scrutinize your results and are committed to scientific rigor. You maintain a high bar and take pride in scientific and engineering excellence, and it shows in all facets of your work.

Player/Coach. You will build and manage a team of AI bioinformaticians. You will also be expected to roll up your sleeves, lead-by-example, and inspire as an exceptional bioinformatician yourself. The exact role you play at any moment will be fluid, shifting from broad direction and influencing to diving deep to solve significantly complex problems. You determine and apply your skills where they will have the greatest impact and yield the highest benefit for our products, systems, technologies, and business. You develop, communicate, and drive strategic initiatives, goals and results over multi-year time horizons. You lead where the overall strategy may not yet be defined. You proactively identify technology gaps and opportunities. You handle critical problems, decisions, and escalations.

Accountability. You and your team will develop and evolve the capabilities roadmap as well as design, implement, ship and support infrastructure and products that are exemplary for scalability, robustness, stability, and cost-effectiveness. You are accountable for the execution and overall experience of the team, the systems they ideate and create, their quality, and how they meet business goals. Positive or negative, you own the results. You are responsible for establishing the right team structure and overall technology strategy to meet short- and long-term objectives. You will ensure the right people are in the right job. You visibly recognize success by giving credit to engineers, managers, and any others who contributed.

Problem solving. You have a combination of practical and intellectual skills and the capacity and willingness to take ownership of a problem and its solution. Where best practices exist, you find, evaluate, and adapt those that are performant to our environment. For new frontiers, you work from first principles to understand the regime and scope of problems before you begin working on solutions. You are able to independently analyze such problems in depth, recognize opportunities for effective solutions, and implement them skillfully. You are able to use reasonable assumptions, data, and customer requirements to scope and solve problems. You lead team design, scoping, and prioritization discussions, and encourage a culture of asking questions to clarify any uncertainties. You work backward from the business context and purpose to guide your team's research, solutions and products. You initiate and build relationships effectively with customers and/or internal partners to understand business impacts and identify any opportunities/problems arising from technical decisions. You are able to map a business goal to a scientific problem and map business metrics to technical metrics. You work with your team to invent, refine and develop your solutions to ensure they are meeting customer needs and team goals. In the event of a problem, you are able to troubleshoot, research the root cause, and thoroughly resolve defects. You take ownership of problems (even when outside your own domain), propose solutions, and either take ownership for their resolution or ensure a clear hand-off to the right owner. You understand the importance of balancing timeliness and capability in your efforts, and are able to test or de-risk a solution before implementing it fully.

Orchestration Beyond your own individual contributor work, you are able to divide responsibilities so that individuals and teams can work independently and have the system and product come together into an integrated whole. You are flexible, adapting your approach to meet the needs of the team, project, or product. You solicit differing views and are willing to change your mind as you learn more. You are adept at building consensus. Teams under your direction are focused and deliver effectively.

Delivering Results. You trust your team to innovate and deliver, verifying that they are achieving intended outcomes. You understand the business drivers, functionality, and technologies behind our systems and products. You define standards of excellence and drive your team to adopt best practices. You are able to effectively prioritize your teams' work and make appropriate tradeoffs given business fundamentals to deliver the highest quality results on time within the constraints of available resources and conditions.You have considerable experience in project and program management. You establish and regularly review performance and operational metrics. You develop closed-loop mechanisms that enable you to quickly identify when projects are at risk and then act decisively to get them back on track. You prioritize efforts that improve overall system architecture, quality, testability, maintainability, and efficiency. You remove technical and operational bottlenecks. You drive your team to proactively identify gaps and opportunities. You make sure risks are mitigated. You look to improve efficiency and you develop and participate in company-wide efforts to drive such improvements (e.g., recruiting, efficiency, action plans, and operational excellence initiatives).

Architecture and design. As a hands-on technical leader, you are accountable for systems architecture, which includes taking ownership of the design and quality of the performance, availability, and operational aspects of the systems being built. You are able to decompose significantly complex problems into straightforward solutions. You know when to apply an incremental approach. You know when to pull back and recommend major refactor/re-architecture efforts (in order to speed up later). You lead scientific and design reviews. You ask the hard questions. You probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding. You align individuals and teams toward coherent architectural strategies and the overall vision. You simplify engineering processes and technologies. Your designs are scalable and cost-effective. Your systems are notable for their innovation and reliability.

Artifacts. You and your team deliver high-quality artifacts (research, schematics, analysis, specifications, prototypes, test plans, strategic narratives, etc.). The team's documentation practices are exemplary in terms of being data-driven, accurate, clear, and complete. Code is organized and easy to extend.

Coding. You are comfortable writing code hands-on and you learn to use new tools quickly. You are willing to learn new languages and frameworks as necessary to achieve the best results for customers and your team. You are passionate about the quality and design of your teams' software and software development environments. You take pride in guiding your teams' software projects and in setting an overall tone for excellence in solution quality. Your team writes secure, stable, testable, maintainable code with minimal defects. You understand basic data structures, algorithms, model evaluation techniques, performance, and optimality tradeoffs. You are able to leverage specialized tools and science libraries to accelerate the development process. You follow engineering and scientific method best practices. Your team's software designs, models, and code are reviewed. You test your code and models thoroughly. You do not put the company at risk (e.g. pulling in unlicensed code, working on code in unsafe ways, etc.). You classify, store, and handle data in accordance with company policies. You clearly document the approach taken to ensure that future generations of scientists and developers understand the intention behind the features and components you build.

Financial discipline. You prioritize the right initiatives to achieve the greatest impact with the least amount of resources. You have day-to-day responsibility for managing the finances of your org including planning, budgeting, procurement, vendor management, analysis, and reporting. You translate your current and proposed initiatives into accurate, detailed budgets to which you adhere. You coordinate with other teams to develop a Board-approved, company-wide budget and annual operating plan that strategically allocates our capital.

Developing leaders. You invest in and grow successful scientists and engineers through collaborative development planning, mentoring, coaching, and strategic project assignment. You create a positive culture and ensure adherence to the company's behavioral norms. You identify and grow future leaders, provide challenging opportunities, and facilitate their exposure to senior management. You confidently handle complex employee situations, run calibration and talent reviews, and build succession plans. You play a significant role in hiring and developing scientists and engineers.

Communication. You are able to communicate your ideas effectively to both technical and non-technical collaborators. You listen to domain experts carefully and take initiative to clarify any questions until you understand the topic clearly. You write reports and present your work with excellence. You clearly explain modeling choices and algorithmic trade-offs made during design.

Influencing. You partner effectively with all levels of leadership and are adept at building consensus. You are able to clearly represent, verbally and in writing, complex decisions, tough trade-offs, and potential solutions to help other leaders understand the decisions they have to make and what options they possess. You influence organizational priorities, business process owners, and business direction. You manage cross-functional communications to ensure all stakeholders are informed and needs are aligned. You drive organizational changes that enable teams to operate more effectively and drive performance.

Thought leadership. You set the standard for AI bioinformatics excellence and technical leadership. You bring business and industry context to technology decisions. Your work focuses on the most advanced, most difficult, most cross-cutting, and/or most ambiguous challenges spanning the company. You are keenly aware of our competitive position. You keep abreast of the capabilities and the technology solutions of competitors. You understand our strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition. You create, influence and participate in initiatives to overcome our weaknesses. You relentlessly drive awareness about the impact and consequences that technology and architecture decisions may have on our business and customers. You amplify your impact by building and educating our technical community, keeping them up to date on advanced technical issues, technologies and trends. You make the business cases for and execute on relevant external communications (i.e., blogs, whitepapers, posters, papers, conference presentations, etc).

Qualifications

PhD in computational biology, computer science, mathematics or related field
Successful track record building and managing teams of PhD-level scientific software developers
Successful track record of advocating for and gaining funding and resources for significant research projects
Deep knowledge of the state-of-the-art (theory and practice) in image processing and microscopy
Possess a breadth of understanding and experience across multiple bioinformatics disciplines (AI/ML, multi-omics, applied mathematics, scientific software design, algorithms, cellular biology, confocal microscopy); Demonstrated ability to acquire additional expertise as needed
Mastery of standard modeling techniques and ability to integrate recent research results
Proven proficiency in hands-on coding, execution, and scaling of scientific software in the context of significant research projects that involve extremely large and complex datasets
Exceptional verbal and written communications skills including effective presentation skills, the ability to articulate complex concepts to cross-functional audiences
Demonstrated ability to handle multiple competing priorities and projects in a fast-paced environment with a proven track record for delivering results on large, cross functional projects
Proven ability to execute as an individual contributor, leader, and leader-of-leaders, in the face of ambiguity, shifting priorities, and limited resources
Possess a set of best practices, a vision of what excellence looks like in your domain, and demonstrated ability to drive the adoption of those practices
Experience building processes, technologies, products, and teams from the ground up
Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain a team of top-tier scientists, engineers and SMEs across all bioinformatics-related functions.
Experience managing both full-time employees and 3rd party external contractors
Considerable experience in project and program management
Exceptional problem solving, analytical and quantitative skills; Experience using data and metrics to test theories, confirm assumptions, and measure success
Proven understanding of business and technical tradeoffs, opportunity costs and ability to make quick business decisions with cross-functional teams
Strong track record of operating creatively and autonomously in both startup and enterprise environments

Vivodyne jobs

Director, AI Bioinformatics