Senior Research Engineer - Generative AI (Multimodal Foundation Models)

Innovation is at the heart of what we do. We work as a cohesive team that collectively develops real-life decision-making and technology products across various industries. We are always on the lookout for talented minds to join our dynamic team and contribute their unique insights. Be part of a stimulating and collaborative environment where your ideas can make an impact and ignite transformative change worldwide.

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!

About the Department

You will be joining InstaDeep's dynamic AI research department, a team of over 40 researchers spanning the US, Europe, and Africa. We drive both fundamental and applied AI innovation across diverse and challenging scientific domains. We are committed to contributing to the open-source community and advancing the field through publications in top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML, and leading academic journals. Explore our work at:

Become a part of our dedicated genomics AI research team, a group of over 15 talented individuals based in our Paris and Boston offices. We are focused on developing the next generation of foundation models for genomics and transcriptomics. Our strength lies in our interdisciplinary approach, bringing together experts in AI and biology, including specialists in generative models, optimization algorithms, high-performance computing, and regulatory genomics. We work closely with applied teams to ensure our research aligns with both internal needs at BioNTech and the needs of our external customers. We are also active members of the research community, disseminating our findings through publications and open-source releases.

About the role:

• As a Senior Research Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in advancing our mission to build cutting-edge AI models for biology.

You will be involved in all aspects of the research process, including:

• Developing and implementing high-quality Python code in a production-level environment.
• Distributing and accelerating code on large-scale accelerator clusters.
• Identifying and preprocessing relevant data sources and building efficient data loading pipelines.
• Staying at the forefront of the latest advancements in both AI and biology.
• Designing and executing training and validation pipelines and interpreting results.
• Contributing to the development of research plans and disseminating our work through research papers and participation in conferences.
• Guiding and mentoring junior team members, with an opportunity to grow into a leadership position overseeing the local Paris team and helping to shape its direction and success.

About you:

• We are seeking highly motivated individuals with an MSc or PhD in a related scientific field who possess a passion for AI and engineering, coupled with 5+ years of experience in a relevant research or engineering role.
• A strong interest in biology is a plus. We are looking for someone with significant experience in writing deep learning code for real applications.
• You need a comprehensive understanding of hardware, software, and machine learning aspects.
• We expect you to champion best practices, help us continuously improve the quality of our codebase, and make it consistently faster and more scalable.
• A theoretical understanding of deep learning is beneficial, but the most important aspect is being hands-on and contributing quickly with robust and efficient implementations while guiding the rest of the team.

If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI systems and believe your skills and experience align with our team's needs, we encourage you to apply!

What we offer

• Within our team, you will have the opportunity to work with extraordinary individuals from diverse backgrounds, countries, and cultures, collaborating across the UK, France, and the US. You'll have the chance to work on real-world applied projects that make a difference, as well as on cutting-edge research endeavors.
• We collaborate with top universities in Europe and the US and regularly publish in leading conferences and journals in the field. You will have the opportunity to be part of such publications. You'll also have access to an exceptional tech stack and hardware. We have extensive and robust experience in scaling systems in JAX and access to over 200 H100 GPUs on our cluster.
• Furthermore, you'll get the chance to work on various generative technologies (autoregressive models, discrete diffusion models, representation learning with masked language modeling, multimodal systems with dozens of modalities) and architectures (convolutions, attention mechanisms, and state-space models) while tackling challenging problem formulations where tensor dimensions can quickly become substantial in genomics.

Our Paris office is located in the vibrant 9th arrondissement, and our brand-new office provides an amazing workspace.

Selected recent publications, projects & news

• Nucleotide Transformer, (Nature Methods, 2024)
• AgroNT, (Communication Biology, 2024)
• How InstaDeep used Cloud TPU v4 to help sustainable agriculture, (Google blog post)
• Kyber is InstaDeep's in-house cluster and ranks among the world's top 100 most powerful clusters and is among the top 20 H100 GPU clusters.

We are a results-oriented, hands-on team that thrives on collaboration. You will have the opportunity to work closely with fellow researchers, applied scientists, and product teams. While your initial focus will be on your technical contributions, we are looking for an individual who can also help foster a strong team environment and is enthusiastic about developing into a leadership role within our Paris office.

Our commitment to our people

We 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.

FAQs

Ready to take the next step? Check out our FAQs and discover what makes us tick!

Can I apply to multiple jobs? I was interviewed/applied last year and wasn't selected. May I reapply? I don't live where the job opportunity is. Can I still apply?