Data Science Lab Lead, Astra Zeneca Gothenburg

At AstraZeneca, we follow the science, turning ideas into life-changing medicines.

Part of AstraZeneca IT, Science and Enabling Units IT is building a best-in-class organization at the forefront of the digital revolution in healthcare and enabling breakthrough drug discovery. We're also applying technologies such as AI, machine learning, software and data engineering and analytics to provide business-critical insights.

About this Role

We are looking for a Data Science Lab Lead keen to tackle some of the most challenging problems in natural language processing and large scale search applications. You will help create intelligent applications powered by knowledge graphs, embeddings and machine learning. You will be part of a close-knit and deeply technical team of data scientists, machine learning and knowledge engineers, creating tools that will advance the standard of healthcare improving the lives of millions of patients across the globe. Your work will advance our ontologies and natural language understanding tooling to capture vast quantities of biological, medical, chemical, and pharmacological knowledge.

The ideal candidate will possess a blend of computational science skills, leadership skills and successful experience building quality applications related to NLP and machine learning in a scientific environment.

Main Duties and Responsibilities

* Devise strategy around NLP tooling, pipeline and templated analytics
* Research and apply latest algorithms and methods to relevant business problems
* Understanding & teaching of fine-tuning language models
* Integrate internal enterprise documents, external data and public corpus into knowledgebase
* Develop rich vocabularies, ontologies and entity normalisation methodologies
* Help in design and creation of AZ knowledge graph
* Lead data scientists, machine learning, engineering and platform teams
* Help other teams to access and leverage natural language to answer research questions

Essential Requirements

* Masters / PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Mathematics or similar field with 2+ years of experience specialising in natural language processing or deep learning
* Experience in leading technical teams
* Strong coding and software engineering skills such as Python, Java
* Experience in using unsupervised and supervised methods over unstructured data: especially with search, text analytics and NLP
* Deep technical skills in knowledge representation, reasoning, graphs, natural language processing, data integration or artificial intelligence
* Experience building large scale data processing pipelines
* Working knowledge of cloud environment (AWS preferred), Hadoop/Spark, SQL
* Ability to explain complex methods and techniques to a non-technical audience
* Influencing and innovation skills
* Ability to collaborate closely with cross-functional teams
* Good communication, written and verbal skills, fluent English

Are you passionate about using your leadership skills and IT expertise to unlock the potential of science? Come and thrive in our culture of excellence, engagement and development - and make a positive difference to patient outcomes.

If you are interested, please apply now!

For more information about the position please contact Nick Brown via

Welcome with your application no later than 1st of May, 2019.

AstraZeneca is an equal opportunity employer. AstraZeneca will consider all qualified applicants for employment without discrimination on grounds of disability, sex or sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity leave status, race or national or ethnic origin, age, religion or belief, gender identity or re-assignment, marital or civil partnership status, protected veteran status (if applicable) or any other characteristic protected by law. AstraZeneca only employs individuals with the right to work in the country/ies where the role is advertised.