Flexible remote position with cancer nonprofit startup

Company and technology overview: Reboot Rx is the tech nonprofit startup dedicated to fast-tracking the development of affordable cancer treatments by repurposing generic drugs (www.rebootrx.org). The key challenge in identifying the most promising generic drugs to pursue is the amount of existing data that first needs to be reviewed. We built proprietary AI technology consisting of machine learning (ML) algorithms, domain-specific rules, and evaluation workflows to systematically prioritize promising non-cancer generic drugs for the treatment of cancer. Developing baseline natural language processing (NLP) methods involved our biomedical scientists manually curating a few thousand annotations on scientific literature to train language models that understand the clinical context within these publications. We selected prostate cancer as our first cancer type to address. By applying our AI technology, we were able to rapidly analyze data from 16K+ published research studies and identify the generic drugs that are most likely to be effective for treating prostate cancer. We are now building global partnerships to test these drugs in larger clinical trials and drive their adoption in the standard of care for patients worldwide.

The Director of Technology will lead the next critical phase of our work: advancing our AI technology building on our success with prostate cancer, so patients with other cancer types can benefit from repurposed therapies. This will involve: 1) updating our model architectures by leveraging recent developments in NLP to dramatically accelerate the generalization of our algorithms across cancers using fewer training samples, and 2) improving our technology infrastructure and analysis procedures to more effectively manage our data pipelines and validation efforts. Enhancements to our technology – higher accuracy models and streamlined review workflows – will enable us to identify promising generic drugs for other cancer types much faster.

Position description: The Director of Technology will report to the CEO and serve as a strategic leader and hands-on contributor overseeing our data science and technology initiatives, with a focus on leveraging AI and ML to support scientific discovery and drive innovation. The ideal candidate will have experience with complex technology projects in healthcare or life sciences, with strong project management expertise. The successful candidate will:

• Spearhead the organization’s technology strategy and program development, particularly around data management and analytical modeling
• Lead research and development of ML methods, particularly language models to process scientific literature, including document classification, entity recognition, and relationship extraction
• Apply statistical expertise to analyze data and conduct quantitative experiments to improve the performance of algorithms and answer research questions
• Architect and build cloud-based infrastructure to organize data pipelines and deploy optimized ML models at scale
• Implement tools and applications to help the science team manage, analyze, and visualize data
• Identify opportunities to expand our impact, recommend technological pivots and data strategies, and facilitate academic and industry partnerships
• Co-author scientific publications
• Supervise a small and growing tech team, including interns and contractors

Preferred skills and qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, data science, or quantitative field (advanced degree preferred)
• 4+ years of relevant experience, preferably at a startup or managing small engineering teams
• Demonstrated experience using ML and NLP techniques
• Experience with cloud computing technologies (preferably AWS)
• Proficient in python, R, and PyTorch and understanding of web frameworks (Flask, Django)
• Knowledge of data systems, particularly data warehousing and data pipeline management
• Understanding of healthcare ecosystem with exposure to clinical data and systems
• Excellent project management skills with the ability to communicate technical information to a wide audience
• Enthusiasm for Reboot Rx’s mission to improve outcomes for cancer patients

Details: This is a full-time, salaried position. Work will be done remotely with a flexible work schedule. The individual can live anywhere within the U.S., though a preference will be given to Massachusetts residents. Occasional travel may be required. Benefits include an employer-matched 401(k) plan with Roth option. Reboot Rx is an equal opportunity employer. All candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.; unfortunately we cannot provide visa sponsorship at this time.

To apply: Please send your resume and a short description of why you would like to work at Reboot Rx to hiring@rebootrx.org. Please include “Director of Technology” in the email subject line.

The Reboot Rx story: Founded by CEO Dr. Laura Kleiman and CTO/COO Pradeep Mangalath in 2020, Reboot Rx is driven by a mission to bring cancer treatments to patients more quickly than traditional approaches to drug development. Our goal is to repurpose generic drugs as-is and not to change the drugs to create new patent protection, as this would negate many of the advantages of finding new uses for approved, low-cost drugs. We see our role as identifying the most promising drug candidates and ensuring that definitive evidence is gathered and the drugs become the standard of care; the drugs are already widely available and we do not plan to manufacture or sell them. We are a small organization with big ambitions, and we have achieved a lot in a short time thanks to numerous collaborations with prominent stakeholders in oncology and tech across academia, government, and industry. Our team is a mix of professionals and graduate and undergraduate students in biology and computer science. We are a positive and supportive team committed to helping all staff develop and grow. Our organization values patient-driven impact, scientific rigor, kindness and respect, open-mindedness and flexibility, and putting health and family first. We are funded through grants and philanthropy, which allows us to pursue the drugs with the greatest potential impact for patients.