Director, Machine Learning, Alzheimer's Disease Initiative
Palo Alto, CA$380k - $420kfull-timePosted 5mo ago
About the role
Scientific leader role to establish and lead a Machine Learning team for Arc Institute’s Alzheimer's Disease Initiative (ADI), focusing on high-throughput interrogation of neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's mechanisms using advanced gene editing and functional genomics, and developing foundation models to infer gene regulation and causal relationships for therapeutic interventions.
Responsibilities
- Attract, build and lead a team of machine learning research scientists focused on foundation models for cellular systems in Alzheimer’s disease
- Develop and execute a roadmap of interpretable ML approaches to understand disease mechanisms (variational inference, causal modeling, transformer- and diffusion-based architectures)
- Collaborate with experimentalists on brain organoid/spheroid cellular models and in vivo models using scRNA-seq, Perturb-seq, and other datasets to unravel causal gene pathways in Alzheimer’s
- Develop predictive modeling to identify perturbations that shift cell states from high-risk to healthy/low-risk
- Collaborate with experimental biologists to ground ML models in disease biology and guide future experiments
- Foster collaborations with external partners in computational biology and neuroscience
- Publish high-impact research via preprints, journals, open source code, and conferences
Qualifications
- PhD in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related quantitative field
- 7+ years of relevant experience with at least 3 years in people management
- Strong research background with experience in academia and/or biotech/pharmaceutical settings focused on scientific innovation
- Proven expertise in ML applications to biological data, especially single-cell profiling and foundation model development
- Deep experience with interpretable ML approaches for biology (e.g., variational inference)
- Advanced technical skills in ML frameworks (preferably PyTorch) and experience with large-scale model training
- Publications in top-tier computational biology and ML journals
- Excellent communication skills for cross-disciplinary audiences
- Hands-on with leadership/mentorship experience
- Neurodegeneration research background including familiarity with Alzheimer’s datasets, pathways, networks, and eQTL analysis is a plus
Skills
Required:Foundation model developmentInterpretable machine learningSingle-cell data analysisCollaboration and leadership
Benefits
- Base salary $380,000-$420,000
- Annual discretionary bonus
- Compound Cash Grant Program (CCGP) with multi-year cash grants
- Other benefits and compensation not specified in description
Last updated Sep 30, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Arc Institute
A full-stack institute for AI and biology research.
Arc Institute is a nonprofit research organization headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
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