Remote Principal ML Engineer - Bioinformatics & Genomics

Placements24; Stellenbosch; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

Professional development allowances

Remote-work stipend

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead bioinformatics initiatives from anywhere in South Africa. The role focuses on designing, deploying, and iterating advanced ML models on genomics and related data, collaborating with scientists, data engineers, and bioinformaticians to accelerate discovery and therapeutic development.

You will mentor senior and junior team members, shape ML strategy, build scalable data pipelines on cloud platforms, and drive MLOps practices.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s degree in a quantitative field (CS/ML/Bioinformatics) required.
• 8+ years of ML engineering experience with bioinformatics or computational biology.
• Proven track record leading ML projects from concept to deployment.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of ML models for bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, and drug discovery.
• Architect scalable data pipelines for large-scale biological data processing.
• Collaborate across teams to translate biological questions into ML problems.
• Develop novel algorithms to address challenges in biological data analysis.
• Evaluate and benchmark models to ensure performance and accuracy.
• Mentor engineers and scientists to foster technical excellence.
• Stay at the forefront of ML and bioinformatics research and apply new tech.
• Communicate complex results effectively to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Contribute to the strategic direction of data science efforts.

Skills

Leadership

Deep learning

Python

TensorFlow

PyTorch

MLOps

Bioinformatics

Cloud platforms

Big data

Education

PhD or MSc in CS/ML/Bioinformatics

Tools

Spark

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead bioinformatics initiatives from anywhere in South Africa. The role focuses on designing, deploying, and iterating advanced ML models on genomics and related data, collaborating with scientists, data engineers, and bioinformaticians to accelerate discovery and therapeutic development.

You will mentor senior and junior team members, shape ML strategy, build scalable data pipelines on cloud platforms, and drive MLOps practices.