Senior ML Engineer - AI-Driven Drug Discovery (Remote)

Placements24; Mtubatuba Local Municipality; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Stock options

Flexible hours

Home office stipend

Health insurance

Professional development

4 Day Work Week

Job summary

Placements24 in South Africa is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for a remote-first R&D team focused on drug discovery. You will design, train, and deploy ML models using large biological/chemical datasets and collaborate with biologists, chemists, and clinicians to translate needs into ML solutions.

Required qualifications include a PhD/Master's in a quantitative field, 5+ years in ML engineering, and proficiency in Python and major ML libraries.

Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, ML, Statistics, Bioinformatics, or related field.
• 5+ years of professional experience in ML engineering with production deployments.
• Proficiency in Python and ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn).
• Experience with Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation.
• Strong understanding of ML algorithms, statistical modeling, and deep learning.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, train, and deploy ML models for target identification and virtual screening.
• Develop data processing and feature engineering pipelines for biological/chemical data.
• Collaborate with biologists, chemists, and clinicians to translate needs into ML solutions.
• Optimize model performance, scalability, and efficiency for large-scale applications.
• Implement MLOps practices for deployment, monitoring, and retraining in production.
• Stay current with ML and AI advancements in life sciences.
• Contribute to ML team roadmap and technical vision.
• Explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Write clean, well-documented code and mentor juniors.

Skills

5+ years ML engineering

Problem-solving

Communication

Education

Master's or PhD in Computer Science / ML / Bioinformatics

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

Python libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn)

Job description

Placements24 in South Africa is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for a remote-first R&D team focused on drug discovery. You will design, train, and deploy ML models using large biological/chemical datasets and collaborate with biologists, chemists, and clinicians to translate needs into ML solutions.

Required qualifications include a PhD/Master's in a quantitative field, 5+ years in ML engineering, and proficiency in Python and major ML libraries.