Flagship Pioneering, Inc. - Principal Scientist, Evolutionary Search & Autonomous Discovery
Requirements
• PhD in a quantitative field (statistics, computer science, applied mathematics, computational biology, physics, or related) with a strong research track record, or equivalent demonstrated expertise with 5+ years of experience post PhD. • Deep expertise in advanced Bayesian causal modeling and/or evolutionary programming — e.g., probabilistic programming, Bayesian model comparison and weighting, genetic/evolutionary algorithms, quality-diversity methods, or population-based search. • advanced Bayesian causal modeling and/or evolutionary programming • Demonstrated ability to design novel algorithms from first principles and bring them to working, validated implementations. • Strong software engineering skills and comfort running computational experiments at scale (parallel/distributed execution of many model evaluations). • A record of scientific leadership recognized by the field — for example, first-author work at top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), influential publications, or widely adopted open-source tools. • Experience applying these methods to biological, scientific, or other mechanistic-modeling domains is highly desirable. • Ability to operate as a senior IC: setting technical direction, collaborating across research and engineering, and mentoring junior colleagues. • Flagship Pioneering invents and builds platform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health, sustainability and beyond. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated more than 100 companies. Many of these companies have addressed humanity’s most urgent challenges: vaccinating billions of people against COVID-19, curing intractable diseases, improving human health, preempting illness, and feeding the world by improving the resiliency and sustainability of agriculture. • Flagship has been recognized twice on FORTUNE’s “Change the World” list, an annual ranking of companies that have made a positive social and environmental impact through activities that are part of their core business strategies and has been twice named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Learn more about Flagship at www.flagshippioneering.com. • At Flagship, we accept impossible missions to enable bigger leaps. Our core values guide us through uncertainty and toward lasting impact.
Responsibilities
• Design and implement algorithms for autonomously generating and evolving populations of candidate solutions at scale. • Develop principled methods for maintaining population diversity, ensuring the search explores genuinely distinct candidates rather than collapsing onto cosmetic variants of the same solution. • Build Bayesian and probabilistic frameworks for evaluating, comparing, and ranking candidates against heterogeneous evidence, including measures of uncertainty and degeneracy across the population. • Define and validate quantitative metrics of diversity and quality across a population of candidates. • Partner with research and engineering teams to integrate these algorithms into closed-loop autonomous science pipelines. • Establish benchmarks and ablations that demonstrate when and why evolved populations outperform single-shot or non-iterative baselines. • Contribute to the broader scientific direction of the team through internal readouts, reusable methods, datasets, prototypes, and external publications.
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