Machine Learning Scientist

Sure, text completion and image generation are cool, but do you know whats cooler than training a transformer to power a supportchatbot with no actual power except the ability to frustrate online shoppers with smoother verbiage than the current generation of automatons or fine-tuning Stable Diffusion to replace a stunt doubles face with Pedro Pascals when he cant be bothered to show up on the set of The Mandalorian IV: The Merchandise Revenue RisesMaking the GPUs go brr in service of saving millions of lives by helping design breakthrough new biomedicines.

PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotechnology company developing novel mRNA vaccines and therapeutics using computational protein design.

Our first vaccine is a next-generation COVID-19 booster, which will enter a first-in-human Phase I clinical trial in the U. S. early this year.

This vaccine is intended to broaden protection against both current and predicted future SARS-CoV-2 variants, reducing the possibility of a new mutation in the virus suddenly causing another massive wave of infection.

We have a preclinical pipeline of 6 additional novel vaccine candidates built on our mRNA-LNP platform that we will be taking into clinical trials over the next few years.

Our work to date has been funded primarily via project agreements totalling 10+ million USD with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Vitalik Buterin's public health & biosecurity organisation Balvi.

At PopVax, we have seen up close that there are incredible capabilities in computational protein design just waiting to be unlocked that will enable us to pursue and perhaps even succeed at realizing wildly ambitious agendas such as preventing future pandemics via broadly-protective vaccines, tackling the deadly scourge of antimicrobial resistance, eliminating debilitating degenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, and curing fiendishly tricky chronic conditions such as ME/CFS and Long COVID.

We seek to accelerate the development of these technologies while, at the same time, ensuring that the benefits they bring are available to everyone that needs them as soon as possible.

If all of the advances made in this seminal moment are controlled by western pharmaceutical companies, they will do what they always dohold on tight to the IP while people in the developing world die.

We must ensure that we in the rising world are at the vanguard of this computational revolution, lest we condemn our people to remain forever at the mercy of the same corporate overlords who denied Africa affordable HIV antivirals in the late 90s and continue to deny Indians https://www nytimes com / 2023 / 02 / 07 / health / cystic-fibrosis-drug-trikafta.

html just two among uncountable examples.

We are building and refining a set of models using a variety of architecturesfrom transformers to graph neural networks to denoising diffusion modelsto solve key problems in the design of vaccine antigens, targeted therapeutics, and nucleic acid delivery chemistry.

We have already seen some impressive results from our workearly versions of our first vaccine candidate perform 10-120x better than existing mRNA vaccines in pseudovirus neutralization assays against key COVID-19 variantsbut we need to expand our team with a small number of exceptionally competent and insatiably curious machine learning folks to keep the momentum going.

The ideal candidate need not have existing knowledge of biology but needs to deeply understand current SOTA ML architectures, both in theory and implementationwe want someone just as comfortable reading the latest ICLR paper as implementing and training a large model on AWS.

They must be willing to learn quickly, build fast, and act independently in an environment with a non-trivial amount of uncertainty, and be willing to rapidly change direction to wherever the data points.

If you come and work with us, we hope that, in short order, its impact will accelerate work that saves or improves millions, and potentially billions, of lives.

There arent many places that can offer you that kind of deep positive impact, not to mention the opportunity to work at the frontier of synthetic biologys machine learning revolution.

Join us!