Data Scientist - Portfolio Optimization

Formation Bio • Boston, NY

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Data Scientist on the platform prediction team, you'll translate our probability of success predictions into measurable portfolio-level outcomes. You'll architect core systems — order management, execution simulation, portfolio construction, risk monitoring, and performance attribution — that let us rigorously evaluate signals from our AI-driven predictions in public and private equities and our internal portfolio. This role sits at the intersection of quantitative finance, healthcare data, and AI-driven drug development. If you're excited about applying portfolio construction and risk management fundamentals to one of the most consequential prediction problems in healthcare, this is the role.No other company — hedge fund or pharma — has a technical data science position translating drug development experience into durable AI-native portfolio strategies. The skills you develop here — portfolio construction over assets with radically asymmetric risk profiles, clinical trial analytics, AI/ML in production, and risk management across multi-year horizons — can directly impact the delivery of new and effective therapeutics to patients by best aligning impactful medicines with economic incentives.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in a quantitative field (statistics, finance, physics, computational science, engineering, or related)
• 1-3 years in a quantitative research, data science, or analytics role — finance, healthcare, academic research, or consulting all count; substantive internships qualify
• Strong Python programming skills with experience in data-intensive workflows (pandas, numpy, scipy)
• Solid grasp of core portfolio construction and risk concepts: position sizing, rebalancing, Sharpe ratio, drawdown, volatility, benchmark comparison
• Demonstrated ability to work with messy, real-world datasets — comfortable with data wrangling, deduplication, and quality assessment
• Clear communicator who can present quantitative results to both technical peers and business stakeholders

Nice To Haves

• Experience with backtesting frameworks or portfolio simulation (vectorbt, Backtrader, or custom implementations)
• Exposure to healthcare, pharma, or biotech data (clinical trials, claims data, -omics, real-world evidence)
• Familiarity with alternative data in a research or investment context
• Experience with probability-of-success modeling, drug development decision analysis, or health economics
• Comfort with LLMs or AI/ML pipelines in a production or research setting
• Familiarity with dashboard/visualization tools (Streamlit, Plotly, Dash) and pipeline orchestration (Dagster, Airflow)
• Healthcare OR finance domain knowledge is valued; both are not required.

Responsibilities

• Work with the team to implement and maintain core portfolio engine: order management system, execution simulation layer, portfolio construction service, and performance tracking
• Design risk frameworks that quantify exposure across a portfolio of drug development bets with radically different risk profiles, timelines, and failure modes
• Run rigorous backtesting experiments with strict temporal constraints to evaluate Formation strategies against baseline approaches and measure marginal signal from new evidence sources
• Coordinate across the organization to integrate internal Formation data sources (clinical trial data, genomic evidence, real-world data) and proprietary tooling into portfolio analytics pipelines
• Work with product and engineering teams to build dashboards and reporting that communicate portfolio performance, risk metrics, and strategy comparisons to both technical and executive stakeholders
• Collaborate with the broader data science team to ensure portfolio-level evaluation feeds back into model improvement and evidence prioritization

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees