Postdoc in Harness, Swarm and Memory Engineering for Computational Biology

Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB); Oost-Vlaanderen; Sur place; EUR 52 000 - 66 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Interdisciplinary environment

Access to unpublished validation data

State-of-the-art computing for LLMs

Data from emerging technologies

Direct connection to LLM engineers

Competitive salary and full benefits

Résumé du poste

Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) in Belgium invites applications for a postdoctoral researcher to advance agentic pipelines that autonomously manage computational tasks. You will oversee multiple computational biology tasks across disciplines and launch swarms to solve them, coordinating with experts to translate needs into new tasks.

You will also collaborate with wet-lab colleagues to integrate validation data and manage a large codebase with harness, memory and swarm components,

Qualifications

• PhD in computational biology or related field.
• Fluency in written and spoken English.
• Broad interest across biological domains.

Responsabilités

• Oversee dozens of computational biology tasks across biological disciplines.
• Launch agent swarms solving these tasks and monitor their progress.
• Communicate with task experts to translate biological needs into new tasks.
• Collaborate with wet-lab teams to identify and integrate validation data.
• Manage a large codebase containing harness, memory, tasks, swarm behaviour and datasets.
• Formulate and test hypotheses to improve harness, memory, or swarming behaviour.
• Present research at international conferences and publish in journals.
• Contribute to supervision of PhD students.

Connaissances

English fluency

Formation

PhD in computational biology or related field

Description du poste

About the lab

The Laboratory of Causal Systems Immunology combines causal inference, probabilistic AI and large-scale in vivo perturbation experiments to uncover how genes shape immune-cell states and predict how the immune system responds to interventions. This tight integration of advanced machine learning and experimental immunology allows us to tackle fundamental biological questions with direct biomedical relevance. We are embedded in both the VIB Center for AI & Computational Biology— a young, ambitious center whose research groups address biological questions through the lens of AI—and the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research, where we collaborate closely with leading experimental immunologists to unravel the cellular and molecular mechanisms of inflammatory diseases.

About the position

The lab is looking for a postdoc to further develop agentic pipelines that autonomously manage computational tasks:

• You oversee dozens of computational biology tasks across biological disciplines
• You launch agent swarms solving these tasks and monitor their progress
• You communicate with task experts to understand ongoing and emerging biological needs and translate them into new tasks
• In collaboration with our wet-lab team and collaborators, you identify and integrate validation data
• In collaboration with the VIB.AI ML unit, you manage a large codebase containing the harness, interpretation, memory, tasks, swarm behaviour and source datasets
• You formulate and test hypotheses that may improve the harness, long-term memory and/or swarming behaviour
• You present your research at international conferences and publish in scientific journals
• You contribute to the supervision of PhD students working in these areas

Your profile

• Excited to bring biology into the agentic era
• Broad interest across biological domains is a must
• PhD in computational biology, computer engineering, computer science, (bio)statistics, artificial intelligence, physics, or related.
• Desire to push the frontier of both biology and (agent-driven) software engineering
• Fluency in written and spoken English
• Embraces complexity

Our offer

• An interdisciplinary environment spanning wet-lab, technology-development and computational teams
• Access to unpublished validation data unavailable to existing agents
• State-of-the-art computing capable of running dozens of local large language models concurrently
• Data from emerging technologies through core facilities and tech watch
• Direct connection to a growing team of LLM engineers at VIB
• Part of a dynamic research center with other groups sharing this missionA competitive salary and full benefits