Sr. Director, ML Research

Job Title: Sr. Director, ML Research

Location: Boston, MA/ San Francisco, CA

Valo Health is a technology company applying human and machine intelligence to accelerate the creation of life-changing medical treatments. At the core of this vision is Valo’s computational platform: an end-to-end, integrated drug discovery and development engine that is being built from the ground up.

Valo hires the best and gives them first-class training and support. If you are driven to perform, you’ll fit right in! We approach our work fearlessly, learn quickly, improve constantly, and celebrate our wins. A centerpiece of our culture is our commitment to inclusion across race, gender, age, religion, identity, and experience. Diversity fuels the Valo experience and drives us every day. We strive to create an inclusive workplace that cultivates bold innovation through collaboration and empowers our people to unleash their full potential.

Valo is looking for an experienced Senior Director of Machine Learning Research to lead and manage the research and development ML team at Valo. You will manage a team of ML researchers and data scientists in advancing the frontiers of AI enabled Healthcare. The methods and practices developed will enable Valo data scientists and scientists to build cutting edge ML models, which will further accelerate our ability to quickly and cost effectively discover, develop, and deliver life changing drugs to patients who need them. 

Opal is an AI-based platform that leverages human-centric data to enable researchers to discover and develop new drugs. Opal is a fully integrated, AI-powered, cloud-native platform that leverages human-centric data to create new approaches to drug discovery and development enabling researchers to minimize the cost and time associated with discovery, development, and delivery of novel therapeutics. The predictive insights produced by Opal rely on high-quality, high-density human-centric data that is sourced from multiple data sets, processed both remotely and on site through a highly complex process.  

Your first area of responsibility is technical direction and management: drive the agenda and roadmap for the ML research and development team that empowers the rest of Valo to build and use the right ML models to solve the right problems. You will provide the guiding development principles and research focus for the team. You will also manage their day-to-day operations. Your second area of responsibility is processes: be the external interface of the ML Research team, to educate and drive adoption of best practices, to gather emerging requirements needed to evolve our systems. 

Your first big goal is to evaluate our existing machine learning capabilities and research plans to create a near term tactical plan, and to collaborate with other teams to sketch out the details of the 2022/23 roadmap. Your second goal is to help build out the ML Research team: set up scalable team processes, participate in hiring, mentor the rest of the team. 

Successful candidates will exhibit the following leadership traits:

• Customer Obsession: Mission- and vision-oriented evangelist. Comfortable with being the face and voice of the product and mission in the market and across the company. Builder mentality. Sees ambiguity as opportunity, and obstacles as chances to build.  
• Think Big: Innovative and creative, with a vision that transcends what is visible today. 
• Earn Trust: Ability to build credibility and rapport with the executive team to drive collaboration and coordination with key stakeholders. High Emotional Quotient (EQ) with strong communication and influencing skills, to create corporate-wide alignment around product vision.  
• Dealing with ambiguity: Comfortable with charting new territories and navigating with imperfect information and considering decisions of trade-offs. 
• Bias for Action: High energy, low ego, and focus on finding data-driven solutions.

• Research and develop novel and adapt existing ML techniques and technologies for incorporation into our Opal Computational Platform to advance our vision of AI enabled Healthcare.
• Help grow and mentor a team of ML researchers to support the increasing needs of our organization
• Drive the nascent ML Research team and other stakeholders toward cutting-edge machine learning practices
• Design and maintain a set of internal machine learning libraries used by Data Scientists across Valo
• Produce and oversee the production of ML related IP in the form of patent applications and scholarly publications
• Work closely with and advise the ML Ops team on which tools to buy or build in all aspects of our ML and Data Science infrastructure stack
• Collaborate closely with software, data science, and ML Ops teams, and with other business stakeholders to understand emerging requirements for modeling and data science.

• Experience with a broad set of modern and classical machine learning and statistical methodologies
• Experience setting goals for and managing ML research teams
• Experience programming professionally in Python and other major languages used in data science
• Experience with the use of cloud-based ML research and development environments
• Experience with Conda, ML Ops tools
• Proven record of publishing applied research on predictive methods in academic journals of your field
• 8-10+ years designing, researching, and implementing predictive and experimental research at scale, 4+ years serving as a technical lead
• Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science, Statistics, or a similar math-heavy technical discipline

• A background in healthcare or biotechnology field preferred 
• Experience with HIPAA/GDPR and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance preferred 

Valo Health, LLC (“Valo”) is a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny built to trans­form the drug dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment process using human-cen­tric data and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-dri­ven com­pu­ta­tion. As a dig­i­tal­ly native com­pa­ny, Valo aims to ful­ly inte­grate human-cen­tric data across the entire drug devel­op­ment life cycle into a sin­gle uni­fied archi­tec­ture, there­by accel­er­at­ing the dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment of life-chang­ing drugs while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reduc­ing costs, time, and fail­ure rates. The com­pa­ny’s Opal Com­pu­ta­tion­al Plat­form™ is an inte­grat­ed set of capa­bil­i­ties designed to trans­form data into valu­able insights that may accel­er­ate dis­cov­er­ies and enable Valo to advance a robust pipeline of pro­grams across car­dio­vas­cu­lar meta­bol­ic renal, oncol­o­gy, and neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease. Found­ed by Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing and head­quar­tered in Boston, MA, Valo also has offices in Lex­ing­ton, MA, San Fran­cis­co, CA, Prince­ton, NJ, and Bran­ford, CT. To learn more, vis­it www​.val​o​health​.com.