Senior Machine Learning Scientist, Frontier Research, AI for Drug Discovery

Roche • South San Francisco, CA

6d

About The Position

Advances in AI, data, and computational sciences are transforming drug discovery and development. Roche’s Research and Early Development organisations at Genentech (gRED) and Pharma (pRED) have demonstrated how these technologies accelerate R&D, leveraging data and novel computational models to drive impact. Seamless data sharing and access to models across gRED and pRED are essential to maximising these opportunities. The new Computational Sciences Center of Excellence (CoE) is a strategic, unified group whose goal is to harness this transformative power of data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist our scientists in both pRED and gRED to deliver more innovative and transformative medicines for patients worldwide. Frontier Research is dedicated to foundational machine learning research and the development of new algorithmic frameworks. We operate with a flat scientific structure in which senior scientists define their own research agendas, and leaders act as mentors who shape priorities across the organization. We view open science as a core value and a competitive necessity. Our commitment to open dissemination, academic engagement, and community contribution ensures that our work contributes meaningfully to the broader machine learning community and advances the scientific ecosystem. In biology, many exciting research questions cannot yet be addressed with off-the-shelf ML approaches—they demand not only novel solutions but also new ways of framing the questions themselves, often beyond existing ML paradigms. We believe that the fields of self-supervised representation learning and generative modeling provide the most promising paths to connect these fields and build robust, impactful solutions.

Requirements

• PhD degree in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, or related disciplines.
• 0 – 2+ years of industry or post-doc experience with a focus on deep learning
• Publications in academic journals like JMLR or at peer-reviewed ML conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, COLT, ICCV, AISTATS, and ACL).
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

• Published work with theoretical contributions.
• Experience with research related to representation learning and generative modeling.
• Public portfolio of computational projects (available on e.g., GitHub).

Responsibilities

• Develop methods in self-supervised representation learning and generative modeling.
• Contribute to publications and present your results at internal and external scientific conferences.
• Collaborate and execute on research that pushes forward the state of the art in machine learning.
• Directly contribute to experiments, including designing experimental details, writing reusable code, running evaluations, and organizing results.
• Work with a large and globally distributed team.

Benefits

• A discretionary annual bonus may be available based on individual and Company performance.
• This position also qualifies for the benefits detailed at the link provided below.

What This Job Offers

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