Senior AI Data Scientist

Faro Health aims to improve lives by helping life sciences companies design optimal clinical trials. Our AI powered software platform optimizes and orchestrates complex clinical development by providing powerful insights about trial design and outcomes. Faro empowers researchers to design more intelligent trials, reducing development costs and reaching milestones faster with better patient experiences.

Faro is a mission driven company seeking world class people who share our passion for improving drug availability and patient outcomes through better clinical trial design. The company prides itself on its vibrant, inclusive, and growth mindset oriented culture. Faro offers competitive compensation and benefits, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours. The company is a hybrid workplace where San Diego employees work from their homes as well as in our lovely main headquarters enjoying a gym, outdoor lawn work area, and food hall. Remote employees work from home and visit the main office for group events and in-person collaboration.

As a Senior AI Data Scientist, you will be working directly with the Principal AI Data Scientist and the CTO to inform and implement the AI strategy and plans for Faro Health, driving their execution. The company is committed to applying state of the art AI models and a range of medical data sets in order to solve challenging customer problems in innovative and powerful ways. Projects will leverage LLMs and other forms of machine learning applied to clinical trial design optimization, protocol document generation, outcome prediction, structured data extraction, and many other areas. This is an integral role that requires deep hands-on skills in data analysis, model design, and model building/implementation skills, along with production-level experience with MLOps, model optimization, LLM prompting/guiding/evaluating, and an ability to go from research or idea through to production. We are looking for a code-heavy (Python) data scientist to help take ideas all the way from prototyping and evaluation to implementation and production deployment.
Candidates must be able to travel to our San Diego office periodically.

Open to candidates residing in California, Nevada, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia or North Carolina.

Responsibilities

• Work with Faro AI leadership, clinical team, and product managers to design new applications of machine learning and execute our AI/ML research plan to create value for Faro's customers
• Implement and evaluate proof of concept prototypes to assess the feasibility of research theses. Collaborate with software engineers to develop tools, end user UX, infrastructure and any other systems needed to productize validated ML models.
• Source and extract signals from a range of structured and unstructured medical data to provide ML-driven insights for generating and optimizing the design of clinical trials.
• Implement and optimize data pipelines and inference models to meet production needs, and monitor and maintain models in production.
• Foster knowledge sharing and education to key product team members, internal stakeholders, and internal engineers about the feasibility, costs, and requirements for machine learning models applied to clinical trial design.
• Mentor more junior data scientists and ML engineers on the team.
• Engage with the latest developments in machine learning and AI applied to the clinical space. Continually develop skills, attend conferences, publish social media articles and papers.
  

Requirements

• University degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or another technical field that encompasses data analysis and predictive modeling.
• Minimum 5+ years experience in ML/AI Engineer or Data Scientist roles building AI-powered product features at high performing technology organizations. Must be both deeply expert hands-on coding and a team leader. Experience in the healthcare or life sciences domain is preferred.
• Expert in Python
• Experience with end to end development.
• Hands-on experience coding RAG LLM pipelines for production using LlamaIndex, LangChain or similar tools (not just cloud services)
• Hands-on experience coding long-form text generation applications for production using data, prompt engineering, evaluation/validation methods, and GenAI LLMs (not just cloud services)
• Hands-on experience with code-based methods of training, prompting, fine-tuning, and evaluating commercial and open source LLMs and their respective Python libraries for production. 
• Hands-on experience coding and optimizing advanced RAG methods and LLM agentic workflows with multiple LLMs for production.Production-grade experience in LLM frameworks such as LlamaIndex, LangChain, and LangGraph.
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross functional teams, including presenting proposed technology vision, collaborating effectively with product, UX, sales, marketing, operations and other groups.
• Ability to move and prototype concepts quickly and have impact in a fast moving startup environment where there might be ambiguous requirements and competing priorities.
• Experience working in and deploying models on an Azure environment is preferred.

Bonus Skills

• Demonstrated ability to rapidly assimilate state of the art AI research and related open source technologies and implement them for evaluation.
• Experience working with clinical trials and their design.
• Ability to lead the technical implementation and application of AI and large language models to complex problems, with the goal of generating significant business value.
• Experience with common ML frameworks like PyTorch, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, etc.
• Experience leveraging platforms and tools for modeling workflow evaluation (weights&biases, neptune, MLFlow, etc.)
• Experience applying AI to sensitive corporate data hosted in private deployments is preferred.
• A knack for creating compelling visualizations and non-technical explanations is a bonus.

Salary

• Base salary range for this position is $168,000 to $211,000
• Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training

Equity

• In addition to this position's salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation for this position. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

Benefits

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (401k)
• Stock Option Plan
• Life Insurance (Basic)
• Short Term and Long Term Disability
• Paid Time Off (Flexible Vacation Policy, Sick & Public Holidays)
• Training & Development
• Work from Home, Office or Hybrid