POD Lead, Scientific Computing for Frontier AI

Zettamine Labs; United States; Remote; USD 45,000 - 65,000; Full time

Job summary

ZettaMine is seeking a POD Lead Scientific Computing Expert (Life Sciences PhD) for a remote freelancing engagement. Immediate start for a 3-week contract to guide a large pod of technical trainers in designing and validating frontier AI research tasks across computational biology, medicine, and life sciences.

Strong Python programming and leadership required. The role emphasizes developing authentic scientific workflows, rigorous validation, and reproducible pipelines, with ongoing feedback and

Qualifications

• PhD, postdoctoral, or equivalent research experience in Life Sciences, Medicine, or a closely related field, with demonstrated computational and scientific programming expertise.
• Strong scientific programming skills, particularly in Python.
• Previous experience working as a POD Lead in similar projects, leading and mentoring technical trainers.
• Expertise in one or more areas such as Bioinformatics, Computational Genomics, Systems Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Biostatistics, Computational Drug Discovery, Structural Biology, Protein Engineering, or Computational Microbiology.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a pod of approximately 510 technical trainers developing terminal-based scientific tasks.
• Design challenging, multi-step scientific workflows across computational biology, bioinformatics, medicine, and life sciences.
• Review scientific tasks end to end, including problem statements, datasets, reference files, pipelines, environments, reference solutions, and automated tests.
• Ensure tasks reflect authentic scientific research and clinical analysis workflows that require meaningful computational reasoning.
• Validate methods, statistical assumptions, calculations, code, intermediate outputs, and final results for accuracy and reproducibility.
• Verify computational pipelines use appropriate tools, reference databases, genome builds, annotation versions, and software dependencies.
• Evaluate outputs such as variant calls, differential expression, clustering, protein metrics, survival estimates, model performance, medical image segmentation, and PK parameters.
• Review automated graders to ensure they assess scientific correctness and analytical quality rather than formatting.
• Ensure datasets are licensed, public or synthetic, de-identified, with no PHI or restricted data.
• Screen tasks for biosafety and dual-use concerns and escalate harmful content when necessary.
• Provide actionable written feedback, track revisions, and ensure quality issues are resolved.
• Onboard trainers, allocate tasks, monitor productivity, resolve blockers, maintain delivery standards.
• Maintain documentation covering task guidelines, recurring issues, quality expectations, and best practices.

Skills

POD Lead

Python

Mentoring trainers

Scientific computing

Life sciences

Education

PhD or postdoctoral in Life Sciences

Postdoctoral experience

Tools

Samtools

GATK

Nextflow

Docker

Snakemake

RNA-Seq tools

Job description

ZettaMine is seeking a POD Lead Scientific Computing Expert (Life Sciences PhD) for a remote freelancing engagement. Immediate start for a 3-week contract to guide a large pod of technical trainers in designing and validating frontier AI research tasks across computational biology, medicine, and life sciences.

Strong Python programming and leadership required. The role emphasizes developing authentic scientific workflows, rigorous validation, and reproducible pipelines, with ongoing feedback and