Director Data Sciences

Relation Therapeutics overview

The critical bottleneck in drug discovery remains poor understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying disease. As a result, often we don’t know why patients become sick; and many drug candidates fail in trials while numerous patients with devastating diseases remain untreated. Historically, successful drugs have sometimes been discovered by sheer luck. Relation delivers a radically different approach that can better understand the biology of disease and rationally discover new therapeutics.

Relation is pioneering a “Lab-in-the-Loop” that can chart and navigate biology at every step of drug discovery, from predicting cell states to the validation of new targets. An important challenge for any therapeutics company using machine learning is “ground-truth data,” or information known to be true. Working from real cells provided by proprietary biobanks, Relation’s technology generates omic data that provide direct insights into critical biological relationships that are fed directly into its platform. The platform then requests new experiments to improve its predictive ability, cutting through an otherwise intractable search space.

At Relation we embrace diversity, equality and inclusion and we are committed to building diverse teams. We are an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age. We strive to create an inclusive interdisciplinary workplace that cultivates innovation through collaboration, empowering and supporting everyone to do their best work and develop to their highest potential.

By joining Relation, you will be part of an exceptionally talented team, learn a broad range of skills within and outside your area of expertise, help us shape our culture and strategic direction and ultimately, make a positive impact in patients’ lives.

Role responsibilities

- Work closely with machine learning scientists and experimental scientists to identify insights in biomedical data types that can be leveraged by cutting-edge ML methods to provide tangible benefits for drug development

- Identify key data types, methods and pipeline tools to be included in our data science capabilities

- Remain at the cutting edge of bioinformatics methods in single cell transcriptomics and/or genetics

- Provide technical leadership on developing our in-house bioinformatics data storage and access infrastructure

- Contribute to innovation, specifically to idea generation and/or experimentation, through tangible and measurable data-driven criteria

- Adhere to Relation’s data science standards and ways of working

- Provide mentorship to junior data scientists across data science, bioinformatics and software development

- Bring a “can-do” attitude, leadership and teamwork, and inspire others on culture change

Professionally, you have :

- A PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, computer science or other quantitative discipline; or equivalent industrial experience

- A demonstrable track record of delivering (as technical lead) complex data science projects to customers. The projects must have involved at least 2 other stakeholders and 1-2 committed FTEs (not students or interns)

- Experience with single-cell data or genetics data preferred, or any other biological / health / chemical data

- Excellence in software development using Python. Proficient Python developer and engineering leader (2 - 5 years of industrial experience); must be familiar with modern software engineering practices, the use of modern collaborative tools and CI/CD (e.g. GitHub, Slack, Jira, Trello etc.)

- Experience mentoring, developing and leading junior staff from different backgrounds across data science and bioinformatics

- Demonstrated a track record in building collaborations and are capable of communicating effectively with diverse teams and functions, including machine learning scientists, computational biologists, software engineers and experimental biologists.

- An ability to work under pressure, manage projects and deliver to defined timelines ensuring that all studies and documents are completed efficiently

Personally, you are:

- An inclusive leader and a team player

- A clear communicator

- Driven by impact

- Humble and hungry to learn

- Motivated and curious

- Passionate about making a difference in patients’ lives

To apply for this position please email enquiry@relationrx.com with a cover note and CV.