PhD Research Engineer Intern - Language Models for Biological Sequences

InstaDeep, founded in 2014, is a pioneering AI company at the forefront of innovation. With strategic offices in major cities worldwide, including London, Paris, Berlin, Tunis, Kigali, Cape Town, Boston, and San Francisco, InstaDeep collaborates with giants like Google DeepMind and prestigious educational institutions like MIT, Stanford, Oxford, UCL, and Imperial College London. We are a Google Cloud Partner and a select NVIDIA Elite Service Delivery Partner. We have been listed among notable players in AI, fast-growing companies, and Europe's 1000 fastest-growing companies in 2022 by Statista and the Financial Times. Our recent acquisition by BioNTech has further solidified our commitment to leading the industry.
Join us to be a part of the AI revolution!
As a PhD Intern in the London Research Team you will be responsible for implementing and developing biological language models, model architectures and novel algorithms, as well as identifying and investigating promising research ideas to the most relevant challenges in biological sequence design. Advances in large language models have enabled us to leverage powerful pre-trained representations for in-silico experiment design optimization loops in few-shot and low-data settings. Many challenges remain on how to best combine these tools for improved downstream tasks. We’re looking for a candidate to contribute to the development of state-of-the-art biological language models focused on advancing fitness prediction and multi-round sequence design methodologies. 

Role responsibilities:

• Support the efforts of the Research Team through the development of novel methods and applications under the guidance of our Research Scientists and Engineers.
• Design and implement ML models for proof of concept and benchmarking.
• Write high-quality, maintainable, well-documented, and modular python code.
• Report and present experimental results and research findings, verbally and in writing.
• Contribute to team research and publications.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a PhD programme (or recent graduate) in a related STEM discipline.
• Experience coding with deep learning frameworks such as JAX, Pytorch and/or Tensorflow, along with theoretical and practical knowledge in machine learning, deep learning, LLMs, Bayesian optimization and/or non-parametric models.
• Excellent communication skills and collaborative spirit.
• Good programming skills in Python.
• Proven ability to contribute to research communities and/or efforts, as evidenced by publishing scientific papers in leading journals or conferences (JMLR, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, etc.).
• Work permit for the UK for the duration of the internship.

Beneficial

• Software engineering skills (git, quality coding standards, …)
• Experience implementing/training/fine-tuning protein language models 
• Specific experience in any of the following domains: coding in JAX, and training models using DP/FSDP techniques. 
• Experience building machine learning models for biological data. 

Our commitment to our peopleWe empower individuals to celebrate their uniqueness here at InstaDeep. Our team comes from all walks of life, and we’re proud to continue encouraging and supporting applicants from underrepresented groups across the globe. Our commitment to creating an authentic environment comes from our ability to learn and grow from our diversity, and how better to experience this than by joining our team? We operate on a hybrid work model with guidance to work at the office 3 days per week to encourage close collaboration and innovation. We are continuing to review the situation with the well-being of InstaDeepers at the forefront of our minds.
Right to work: Please note that you will require the legal right to work in the location you are applying for.