Director, Biopharma Data Science

We are looking for a visionary Director, Biopharma Data Science to champion the development of our AI Scientist, an agentic system designed to navigate the complexities of target and drug discovery. You will lead a squad of data/research/AI scientists at the interface of machine learning and computational biology, working as both builders of and expert internal users of Owkin’s K Pro platform on real scientific use cases.

You’ll be at the heart of Owkin’s mission, collaborating with Owkin’s scientists and/or external collaborators (academic researchers/ pharmaceutical companies) to deliver our strategic projects, and creating the engine that will discover the next generation of life-saving therapeutics. This role is about building a “scientist in a box” that can reason over biological data, design experiments, and autonomously drive therapeutic breakthroughs.

In Particular, You Will

• Co-build the development of Owkin’s AI Scientist, across two complementary discovery paradigms:
• data-first discovery (deriving targets and pharmaceutical insights from multimodal patient data, across modalities and stages of clinical development) and
• knowledge-first discovery (generating and testing novel scientific hypotheses grounded in the scientific literature, then validating them on data).
• Lead and/or contribute to projects aiming to discover novel drug targets, biomarkers and disease subtypes through reverse translation based on patients’ multi-omics and pre-clinical data (genomics, transcriptomics -spatial, single-cell, bulk-, proteomics, and others) via multimodal analyses and machine / deep learning algorithms.
• Collaborate closely with your biomedical team colleagues (biologists, MDs, computational chemists) and with Owkin’s broader Research & Technology team (agentic engineers, software engineers, ML engineers, and others).
• Contribute scientific input to help anticipate and shape the tools and capabilities our pharmaceutical partners will need, in coordination with Owkin’s client-facing teams.
• Communicate your scientific results internally and externally.
• Participate in extending Owkin’s methodology, including but not limited to regular literature review.
• Develop and retain a high performing and engaged scientists team.

The successful candidate is independent, deeply curious, and obsessed with the idea of automating the scientific method. You don’t just wait for the perfect dataset, you build the tools to have it., * Technical Foundation: PhD in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or Data Science, Computer Science, Machine Learning but with strong knowledge of Computational Biology (or equivalent high-level industry experience).

• Deep expertise on multimodal datasets, especially on different omics modalities (bulkRNA seq, single cell, spatial transcriptomic, WGS, WES, GWAS, proteomics, …).
• The Toolkit:
• Expert-level Python skills with a focus on “building”.
• Comfortable writing clean, modular code that interfaces with complex APIs and databases.
• Publication Record: History of contributions to top-tier journals and conferences.
• Communication:
• Ability to explain complex agent behaviors to both AI and biological experts.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Fluent in English (French is a plus).
• Stakeholder Management: Able to manage expectations from stakeholders at all levels, including cross-functional teams within Owkin.
• Team first, highly collaborative mindset.

Preferred Qualifications (The “Big Plus”)

• Expertise in Agentic AI: Deep understanding of LLM reasoning (Chain-of-Thought, ReAct), long-context management, and tool-augmented generation.
• Transverse knowledge: Good understanding or previous experience on other data modalities relevant for medical purposes and drug discovery (H&E, EHR, …)
• Systems Engineering: Experience training and deploying large-scale models and managing complex multi-agent orchestrations.
• Causal Inference: Experience in understanding “response to treatment” and causal discovery in biological systems.
• Industry Impact: Proven track record of taking a research concept and turning it into a functional tool used by other scientists.

Owkin is an agentic AI company pioneering Biological Artificial Superintelligence to solve problems in biology where human researchers alone have failed.

Owkin builds K Pro - an AI scientist for pharmaceutical research and strategic decision-making. K Pro orchestrates a suite of AI skills and tools to decode complex biology, accelerate research, and dramatically increase productivity.

K Pro is built on Owkin’s unrivalled multimodal patient data network, state-of-the-art AI for biology and a decade of experience working with pharmaceutical partners., * Owkin is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, color, religion, national origin, protected veteran status or on the basis of disability.

• Owkin is a great place to work. As a coveted workplace we are, unfortunately, vulnerable to recruitment phishing scams. We urge all job seekers and candidates to be wary of potential scams. Most of these have individuals posing as representatives of prominent companies, including Owkin, with the aim of obtaining personal, sensitive, or financial information from applicants. These scams prey upon an individual’s desire to obtain a job and can sometimes “feel” like a genuine recruitment process. Some red flags are identified below. Should you encounter a recruitment process that claims to be for Owkin but is not consistent with the below, please do not provide any personal or financial information:
• Legitimate Owkin recruitment processes include communication with candidates through recognized professional networks, such as LinkedIn.
• Communication is always through an official Owkin email address (from the @owkin.com domain), over the phone or through our applicant tracking system (Greenhouse).
• The Owkin talent team do use platforms such as LinkedIn and Job Teaser, however if you have any concern or doubt about this contact, please ask for them to send an email from @Owkin.com.
• The Owkin talent team will not solicit personal data from candidates during the application phase including, but not limited to, date of birth, social security numbers, or bank account information;
• Legitimate Owkin interviews may be conducted over the phone, in person, or via an approved enterprise videoconferencing service (Google Meets). They will not occur via Signal, Telegram or Messenger
• Owkin offers of employment are based on merit and only extended once a candidate has interviewed with members of the talent and hiring team. Offers will be extended both verbally and in written format.