Research Scientist: Machine Learning for Drug Discovery and Biodata

Location: Dublin, Ireland

Team: Accenture Labs Bioinnovation

Level: CL8

Type: Full-time, on-site (hybrid)

About: This is an opportunity to play a key role in the Accenture Labs BioInnovation team, in Dublin Ireland.

Accenture Labs BioInnovation is the biotech research arm of Accenture Labs and focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, and Computational Chemistry with a strong emphasis on Machine Learning for Life Sciences.

The lab is co-located with The Dock, Accenture's global center for innovation.

We design and prototype new ideas that have a strategic impact on our clients’ businesses. We offer a blend of industry-related research projects and academic-oriented activities, including an open publication policy and contribution to the open-source community.

Job Description:

• •Design and implement AI research prototypes for the life sciences, including genomic medicine and computational chemistry.
• •Collaborate with peer research scientists and engineers and turn experimental methods and their output into full-fledged prototypes to showcase the impact of our research.
• •Develop and implement machine learning models for de novo molecule generation and property prediction (small molecules and biologics)
• •Design and optimize deep learning architectures for molecular generation and optimization (e.g., graph machine learning, transformers, diffusion models).
• •Design and implement machine learning prototypes tthat learn insights from multi-omics data (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics).
• •Build data ingestion pipelines to process and analyze large-scale biochemical and multi-omics datasets (e.g., SMILES, PDB, proteomics, genomics, clinical records).
• •Propose novel research directions and align with the team’s strategy.
• •Collaborate with subject matter experts to integrate domain knowledge into our AI models and interpret results.
• •Stay on top of the latest advancements in AI/machine learning, AI for drug discovery, computational chemistry, and bioinformatics.
• •Write clean, well-documented code. Design and execute experiments. Describe and present results to technical and lay audiences.

Required qualifications and skillset:

• •PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry, Computational Genomics, or equivalent industry experience.
• •Strong Machine Learning and Deep Learning foundations.
• •Solid Python and Scientific Python programming skills (e.g. NumPy) and Machine Learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• •Prior hands-on experience with AI/ML research prototypes design and development
• •Proven knowledge of parallel computing techniques for Python and GPU acceleration, to optimize model training and data processing workflows.
• •Solid experience with data engineering, data ingestion, relational databases management, SQL.
• •Working knowledge of Linux OS, shell scripting
• •Hands-on experience with git and popular issue tracking systems
• •Ability to work creatively and analytically in a problem-solving environment
• •Eagerness to contribute to a team-oriented environment
• •Excellent verbal and written communication in English

Optional skillset:

• •Practical experience with LLMs (frontier API-based and self-hosted/open-weight), including retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning, PEFT (e.g., LoRA/QLoRA), and building agentic workflows.
• •Familiarity with common genomic data formats (e.g., FASTQ, VCF).
• •Experience processing Electronic Health Record (EHR) datasets.
• •Familiarity with Knowledge Graph technologies a plus, but not a hard requirement (e.g. RDF, RDFS/OWL, SPARQL, triplestores, Neo4j).
• •Expertise in back-end development (e.g. Django, Flask)
• •Previous contributions to open-source projects in the machine learning, bioinformatics or computational chemistry space.

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About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 791,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com

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