Principal Data Scientist at Faro Health Inc

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. We pride ourselves on our vibrant, inclusive, and growth mindset oriented culture. Faro offers competitive compensation and benefits, generous vacation and parental leave, and flexible working hours. We are a hybrid workplace where San Diego employees work from their homes as well as in our lovely main headquarters enjoying a gym with classes and (early next year) spa services, outdoor lawn work area, and steeply discounted food hall. Remote employees work from home and visit the main office for group events and in-person collaboration.

As the most senior Data Scientist on the team, you will be working directly with the CTO to shape the AI strategy and plans for Faro Health, and leading 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 a leadership role that not only requires superlative hands-on research, data analysis, model design, and implementation skills but also future envisioning, internal and external communication, relationship building, and team leadership. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader who can assess the state of the art in both academia and industry, come up with AI and data driven theses to address the most pressing customer needs, and take ideas all the way from prototyping and evaluation to implementation and production deployment.

Open to candidates in California.

Responsibilities

• Work with Faro leadership, customers, clinical team, and product managers to ideate new applications of machine learning and put together an 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
• Educate and inform key product team members, internal stakeholders, and customers about the possibilities, risks, and evolving landscape of machine learning models applied to clinical trial design
• Mentor and oversee 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

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or another technical field that encompasses data analysis and predictive modeling.
• Minimum 9+ years experience in ML 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 life sciences domain is preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly assimilate state of the art AI research and related open source technologies, and use them to come up with innovative ideas that solve problems in new ways.
• Ability to lead and drive an organization’s AI strategy and plans - conceiving, prototyping, evaluating, and implementing the application of deep learning and large language models to complex problems, and generating significant business value.
• Expert proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch or Tensorflow applied within Cloud environments. Experiencing deploying production models in an Azure or AWS environment is preferred.
• Familiar with methods of training, prompting, fine-tuning, and evaluating commercial and open source LLMs. Experience with RAG applied to sensitive corporate data hosted in private deployments is preferred.
• 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

Benefits

Annual salary

The expected salary range for this position is $158,000-$217,000

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.

US Benefits

• Health care plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement plan (401k)
• Life insurance (Basic)
• Short term and long term disability
• Paid time off: flexible vacation policy; paid sick days & public holidays observed
• Continuous training & development with up to $1000/year reimbursed fees subject to manager approval

Faro makes software that takes clinical researchers to the next level. Our mission is to improve the lives of patients by empowering teams to conduct more effective clinical research faster. While others areas of life sciences have benefited from software development, clinical trials are still mostly designed and communicated in Word documents. Off-the-shelf solutions are not easily customized to meet the unique workflow and data needs of clinical trials.

We are working on a new way. We are building a platform that empowers clinical researchers to standardize, automate, and streamline the most complex clinical trial challenges. We’re passionate about our mission, and you can see it in the quality of work we do and the caliber of people we hire.