Senior Data Scientist, Imaging Foundation Models

Merck • Cambridge, MA

7d • $144,800 - $227,900 • Hybrid

About The Position

Within DAGS, our AI/ML team drives innovation across disease areas by building biologically grounded and interpretable imaging pipelines. In Immunology, digital pathology plays a critical role in understanding tissue level immune mechanisms and supporting companion diagnostics. We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist with strong expertise in computer vision and biomedical imaging to develop scalable imaging foundation models and interpretable pipelines for immunology and oncology biomarker discovery.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, AI/ML, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genetics & Genomics, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Pharmaceutical Science, or related STEM field with 0+ years postdoctoral experience or Master’s degree with 4+ years of industry experience.
• Strong expertise in computer vision and medical image analysis and/or multimodal data.
• Experience building and/or applying models for segmentation, detection, and representation learning, ideally in histopathology.
• Familiarity with modern deep learning architectures (e.g., transformers, vision foundation models).
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Strong interest in immunology and tissue‑based biomarker discovery.
• Ability to communicate complex technical ideas to multidisciplinary scientific partners.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with clinical or translational imaging biomarker programs.
• Publications in venues such as MICCAI, CVPR, NeurIPS, ISBI, or related journals.

Responsibilities

• Develop and train imaging foundation models for histopathology, with a focus on immune‑relevant tissue and cellular patterns.
• Build segmentation driven and cell‑centric pipelines (e.g., immune cell typing, spatial organization, microenvironment analysis).
• Design interpretable modeling workflows that link image derived features to biological hypotheses and clinical endpoints.
• Apply zero‑shot and weakly supervised learning methods to extract immune signals from H&E and IHC data.
• Collaborate closely with immunologists, pathologists, and translational teams to ensure biological relevance and interpretability.
• Support imaging biomarker development efforts, including applications toward companion diagnostics.
• Contribute to platform level imaging strategies, QC standards, and best practices within DAGS.
• Share findings through internal forums, publications, and scientific collaborations.

Benefits

• medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family)
• retirement benefits, including 401(k)
• paid holidays
• vacation
• compassionate and sick days
• annual bonus
• long-term incentive

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree