Senior Machine Learning Engineer (m/f/d)

Full time – Berlin, Germany

Are you passionate about developing impactful applications of machine learning? Does the prospect of dealing with complex problems in an exciting domain interest you? Do you want to play an instrumental role in building deep learning products?

We are looking for an ambitious Machine Learning Engineer to enhance our team and to help us build the next generation of machine learning applications for the healthcare industry.

What we do

At Vara, we aim to make high-quality diagnostic services accessible to and affordable for patients all around the world by applying machine learning on medical images. Our product Vara enables radiologists to reach superior diagnostic performance for the detection of breast cancer. Our vision is that no human dies from a curable disease anymore.

Our team is made up of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from top-tier companies and universities around the world. Many of us have PhDs and extensive research experience. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing!

Further information can be found on our website: www.vara.ai.

Your Responsibilities

You will use modern machine learning to develop models for medical data and will build infrastructure that enables training and deploying deep learning models at scale. The tasks are diverse and non-repetitive, as we constantly strive to improve our models with new methods. Successful projects will be highly automated via clean, maintainable code. You will work in a team with our machine intelligence, data and software engineers, profiting from and enriching their expertise.

Your main responsibilities will include:

• Research and build state-of-the-art deep learning models that close the often underestimated gap from publications to robust applications
• Have a rigorous and scientific approach to key challenges in machine learning such as uncertainty and dataset shift.
• Design and write clean code in an environment where research is very close to production.
• Learn about the medical domain to understand how to build better models and use them to achieve a clinical benefit.
• Clear communication of results in the team

Your Qualifications

We define ourselves by a culture of friendship and ownership. We’re looking for capable, driven, and thoughtful people to add to our vision.

Basic qualifications:

• BA/BS in computer science or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience in applied machine learning and software engineering

The preferred qualifications are just that: preferred. None of us walked in with all of them. If a few of these points apply to you, we definitely want to talk!

Preferred qualifications:

• MSc or PhD in computer science, machine learning, or related technical field
• Exceptional competence in two of the following and a demonstrated interest in the other: machine learning, software engineering and medical imaging
• Proven track record in either fundamental or applied machine learning through publications in top tier conferences/journals or high performance solutions deployed in the real world.
• We appreciate a demonstrated ability to solve non-standard problems in a clean and formal way that may not necessarily involve deep learning but has a clear quantitative focus such as e.g. on probabilistic modelling or alike.
• Experience with uncertainty quantification, Bayesian deep learning or anomaly detection
• Experience with one or more of the following technologies: Google Cloud Platform, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, Docker or equivalent
• Industry experience working with machine learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, ...), large-scale data processing systems, or cloud infrastructure
• Significant industry experience developing enterprise or data products
• Background in deep learning, computer vision, NLP, or related fields

Company Culture & Benefits

We believe in ownership, flat hierarchy and direct communication, which means that we operate and learn fast, as a team. In addition to a competitive salary, equity package and fringe benefits (like company hardware or company lunches), the following aspects are central to our company culture:

• Dynamic working culture: Vara offers a dynamic and flexible work environment. Some of us come in during regular business hours, and some of us prefer to start later or earlier. We are a fully trust-based organisation and believe in ownership, personal responsibility, and the motivation of our people.
• Professional Development: be it seminars, workshops, conferences or other methods, we encourage our employees to continuously develop their personal skill set.
• Collaborative Culture: we have regular off sites and team dinners. If you want to participate, that’s great! And if you don’t, that’s fine too.
• Excellence: We are driven researchers, developers and entrepreneurs who believe in what they create and are committed to the success of it. In order to build disruptive products, we strive for outstanding quality and visionary ideas in a high-performance environment.  

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We consider all applications equally regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or gender identity. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech to apply, and we can help with immigration.