Syntensor

Geometric machine learning provides a unique mechanism for understanding the dynamics of biological systems through the topology of those systems. Syntensor maintains a single backbone model which is used to capture the dynamics and state-space of a very large-scale representation (2m nodes per cell type for ~2k cell types) of human physiology, and Graph Neural Networks are at the core of this effort.

Join a team of world-leading experts in this domain and help drive the field forward as we tackle a problem space only recently made tractable by advances in ML and HPC.

The role

This role offers the potential for extraordinary impact in a well-established market/economy for deep learning applications.

• Invent, benchmark, and implement state-of-the-art methods in Pytorch Geometric (PyG). To do this you will develop methodology and experiments to validate implementations and possible improvements by testing on smaller, academic problems.
• Get full support with publishing results (using toy/academic datasets) if effective methods are discovered.
• Contribute to various Open Source projects e.g. PyG, TorchDyn, Pytorch Lightning, PyTorch, Julia, JAX.
• Collaborate with DiffEqML, MILA, UM, Stanford and other academic teams and get exposure to leading methods in deep learning and HPC.
• Competitive compensation: We offer a starting salary in the top quartile for role and level, based on local benchmarks.
• Stock options: You are joining an early stage startup. We want you to have ‘skin in the game’ and your options package will reflect this.
• 401K for US-based team members.
• Your health, dental and vision insurance will be fully covered, with partial coverage for family/partners as well.
• Self-manage: Enjoy the flexibility and opportunities that come with early stage startups. You’ll work closely with all areas of the business with a high degree of autonomy and the opportunity to progress as an individual contributor or manager. Syntensor is a distributed-first company, working from home and collaborating asynchronously from the East and West Coast US, Canada and Europe.
• Take on a grand challenge and share our purposeful mission: We’re building a biological systems simulator that will transform how medicines are developed and prescribed. You will be advancing the field while making a big impact on the wellbeing of millions of patients.

### About you

• 3 years experience at graduate+ level in GNNs
• Strong theoretical understanding of graphs, topology, geometric modeling
• Publications in ML or, even better, ML + Hard Science
• Familiar with dynamical systems and the applications of differential equations towards time-series modeling

Nice to haves

• Experience working within the domain of biological systems
• OSS contributor
• Successfully invented and implemented a unique use-case for a GNN
• PyTorch Geometric / DGL / JAX user
• Publications at a premier CS conference e.g. ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, etc.
• Experience with early-stage startups

About us

Our mission

We are on a mission to provide access to more effective medicines for millions of patients. We’re building a model of human molecular physiology for research scientists and clinicians that can answer the fundamental question, "will it work?"

Every modernized field of engineering has a systems simulator to test complex interactions in bits rather than atoms. This doesn’t yet exist for biology. Without one, drug development is expensive because risk of failure is very high; 30-60% of prescribed medicines have no clinical benefit to patients and adverse reaction to treatment is the 4th leading cause of death in the US, ahead of pulmonary disease and diabetes. Syntensor is taking on this grand challenge, developing fundamental machine learning methods and applying them at scale to biological data so every individual patient can be prescribed the most effective, least toxic treatment possible.

What we do

We are productionizing and scaling up a generalizable machine learning platform that predicts efficacy and toxicity for any drug in any indication. We are using an extensive, heterogeneous biomedical graph, novel fundamental ML methods and advanced engineering infrastructure to generate and explain model outputs for users of our app. Currently, our users are research scientists involved in drug development.

The team

We are a small team of people with diverse skills and a shared bias towards problem solving and execution. We are inventors and builders who believe in the scientific method; feedback and iteration is essential to our process and we share our work early and often. That said, we aim high. Our mission and the domain in which we operate demand that we take on some of the hardest problems researchers, scientists, engineers and designers face, and we are determined to build technology that solves them properly and usefully for users of our platform. We are looking for talented people who are motivated by the challenge of hard problems and who are already curious about the technological, scientific or cultural domains with which we engage.

We are a distributed-first team and very relaxed about where and when work happens, but come together as a whole team weekly to sync-up. We work with intrinsic curiosity and motivation towards well defined goals (even where there are unknown unknowns). Our diversity, great communication and respectful, supportive teamwork make us highly effective.