Senior ML Engineer, Digital Drug Discovery

For over 100 years we have been driving change to defeat diabetes, but we know that what got us here today is not necessarily what will make us successful in the future. We are now transforming our business and taking our expertise into new territories including obesity and rare blood and endocrine diseases. Our story is one of incredible growth and success, which has culminated in receiving many prestigious awards, such as Best Places to Work and Vitality – Britain’s Healthiest Workplace.

The Position

The Digital, Data and IT, Research and Early Development (DD&IT-R&ED) team is on the lookout for a passionate and innovative Senior AI/ML Engineer. This role is pivotal in optimizing and deploying AI/ML solutions that drive the future of drug development. If you’re excited about revolutionizing AI/ML in the pharmaceutical industry, and collaborating with a diverse team of AI/ML scientists, scaling up exploratory work, and transitioning solutions from notebooks to robust ML pipelines, this could be your next career move.

Your key responsibilities will include:

• Collaborative Innovation: Working directly with AI/ML scientists on solution optimization and production deployment and acting as an internal consultant to transition ideas from prototype to production.
• Creating Scalable Solutions: Develop training and serving pipelines using reusable components to deliver scalable ML solutions. Work closely with scientists to promote the adoption of ML and MLOps best practices.
• Model Monitoring: Use data analysis and visualisation to identify and understand concept drift and/or differences in data distributions that could impact the performance of models in production.
• Data Quality Assurance: Maintain training and inference data qualitythrough data cleaning and validation strategies.

We offer a flexible hybrid working model with 2 days from home and 2-3 days at our central London office, where you'll collaborate with digital specialists and scientists. We prioritise work-life balance and foster a supportive, inclusive culture where your contributions are valued.

Qualifications

We are looking for a candidate with a positive personality, effective communication skills and well-established technical expertise who values a collaborative environment. You should have experience working with technical data scientists, data and infrastructure engineers, as well as business stakeholders. A PhD or master's degree with relevant experience, or a bachelor's degree with solid expertise, is required. Recent work experience in a healthcare/life science organization would be valued.

Other skills we are searching for are:

• ML & MLOps: Experience with the Python data science stack (e.g., Scikit-learn, Pandas, Jupyter, HuggingFace etc.), and an understanding of deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch. Exposure to GPU-accelerated deep learning would be useful. You'll know how to integrate these tools (and others) as part of the full MLOps lifecycle - from data extraction to model serving and monitoring.
• Software Engineering: Proficiency with Python, an appreciation of design patterns, test automation, Git, CICD and some experience with containerisation and orchestration (e.g., Docker and/or Kubernetes) for deployment would be a bonus.
• Cloud & Automation:  Experience with deploying ML solutions to Azure and/or AWS, with an automation first mindset that values infrastructure-as-code.
• LLM Experience:  Exposure to LLMs (e.g., fine-tuning, deploying or RAG systems, etc.), would be valued.

About the Department

The position is connected to our DDIT-R&ED UK department located in the heart of London and the University of Oxford medical campus. The department currently consists of 14 Software-, Cloud-, and ML-Engineers and is building up additional capabilities and capacity.

We are strongly linked with the Novo Nordisk Research Centre Oxford (NNRCO), an innovative target discovery unit with a focus on identifying novel, game-changing therapies for patients. The site is a fusion of the best of academia, biotech, software engineering, and big pharma to realize cutting-edge biology. NNRCO operates at the boundaries of frontier science with a mandate to find dynamic, agile, and distinctive new ways of working to diversify the company’s pipeline with disruptive medicines. We strive to efficiently drive digital, data & IT innovation and transformation by leveraging agile methodologies.

Working at Novo Nordisk

We are a proud life-science company, and life is our reason to exist. We’re inspired by life in all its forms and shapes, ups and downs, opportunities and challenges. For employees at Novo Nordisk, life means many things – from the building blocks of life that form the basis of ground-breaking scientific research, to our rich personal lives that motivate and energise us to perform our best at work. Ultimately, life is why we’re all here - to ensure that people can lead a life independent of chronic disease.

What We Offer

• Bonus: We do our best work to succeed together. When goals are reached, you’ll be rewarded through our bonus scheme.
• Your workplace: Our offices will be your primary workplace but with flexibility to work 2-3 days at home during your working week.
• Pension: a market leading pension scheme with generous employer contributions
• Wellness: We want you to be your best self, so you’ll have access to an award winning Wellness programme, including Private Medical Insurance.
• Insurances: All colleagues are covered by our private medical, life and disability insurance which provides protection and peace of mind.
• Inclusive culture: our culture is one of care, support and respect for our people. We are committed to making your workplace safe and believe that a transparent, inclusive culture and leadership is the way to empower every individual to do their very best.

Application support

We are an equal opportunities employer and we commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants. If you're a person with a disability, if you're neurodivergent, and need any adjustments to be made during the application and selection process, please send an emails to Ola, akrw@novonordisk.com. Please include your name, the role you are interested in and the type of adjustment your need.

Contact

Apply to the role by submitting you application via our careers site, as unfortunately we do not accept directly sent resumes.

Deadline

Please apply before 10 November 2024.

Please note that applications will be reviewed continuously, and interviews will be planned as soon as a suitable candidate is identified.

We commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants. 

At Novo Nordisk we recognize that it is no longer good enough to aspire to be the best company in the world. We need to aspire to be the best company for the world and we know that this is only possible with talented employees with diverse perspectives, backgrounds and cultures. We are therefore committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates the diversity of our employees, the patients we serve and communities we operate in. Together, we’re life changing.