Summary
AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines for some of the world's most serious diseases. But we're more than one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. At AstraZeneca, we're proud to have a unique workplace culture that inspires innovation and collaboration. Here, employees are empowered to express diverse perspectives and are made to feel valued, energized and rewarded for their ideas and creativity.
Department – Data & Analytics, S&EUIT
Science and Enabling Units IT is a global IT capability supporting Drug Research, Drug Development, Product & Portfolio Strategy, Medical Affairs, Finance, HR, Compliance, Legal and Global Business Services. We are organized around 7 key capability areas: Business Partnering, Solution Delivery, Architecture, Application Support, Data & Analytics, Change & Operations, operating out of sites across the US, UK, Sweden, India and Mexico.
Data & Analytics provides analytics and data insight services and solutions critical to the Data & AI/ML emerging strategy and mission of S&EUIT and AZ. D&A is organized into teams specializing in Information Architecture, Data Engineering, Data Visualisation, Knowledge Management, Data Science, Data Analysis and Information Governance.
Role
We are looking for knowledge engineers to help up create intelligent applications powered by knowledge graphs and machine learning. In this deeply technical and close-knit team of data scientists, machine learning engineers and knowledge engineers you will create tools that will advance the standard of healthcare improving the lives of millions of patients across the globe. You will create vocabularies and ontologies to capture vast quantities of biological, medical, chemical, and pharmacological knowledge. You will devise data processing and integration pipelines to expand our knowledge graph with data coming from highly heterogeneous distributed data sources. And you will work with our machine learning engineers and data scientists to populate and exploit the knowledge graph to derive new insights in support for our drug development research.
Our team empowers our scientists from early development to the late stages in drug development, driving innovation and acting as a catalyst for the adoption of the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. We jointly devise novel approaches to drug development and liaise with our platforms team to transition the latest and greatest technologies and algorithms to production. In this role, besides making a meaningful impact to people's lives you will have the opportunity to engage with exciting drug development research, and use your data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence skills to solve challenging technical and scientific problems.
The ideal candidate will possess a blend of computational science skills, knowledge management skills and experience of successfully applying semantic engineering in a pharmaceutical research environment.
Key Accountabilities
- Devise rich vocabularies and ontologies to best support the knowledge graph and the integration of disparate data sources
- Design, develop, test and maintain knowledge graph creation, consistency checking, maintenance analysis and debugging tools.
- Integrate new structured and unstructured data sources into a coherent and consistent knowledge graph
- Work closely with data scientists, machine learning, engineering and platform teams
- Help other teams to access and leverage the knowledge graph to answer research questions
- Develop a robust understanding of relevant AZ internal and external content sources and their provenance, quality and structure, to support optimal use
Candidate Knowledge, Skills and Experience
- MS in Computer Science, Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web, Bioinformatics or similar field with 2+ years of experience developing knowledge graphs or exploiting NLP in industry
- Deep technical skills in knowledge representation, reasoning, graphs, natural language processing, data integration or artificial intelligence
- Strong software development skills, with proficiency in Java and /or Python preferred
- Experience with graph technologies, e.g., RDF(S), SPARQL, graph and triple-stores
- Experience building large scale data processing pipelines
- Working knowledge of cloud environment (AWS preferred), Hadoop/Spark, SQL
- Creative, collaborative, & product focused
- Experience of pharmaceutical competitor and scientific intelligence delivery
- Experience in using unsupervised and supervised methods over unstructured data: esp with search, text analytics and NLP.
- Knowledge of scraping documents and document extraction key.
- Ability to explain complex methods and techniques to a non-technical audience
In addition, candidates will be expected to demonstrate:
- Influencing and innovation skills
- Good communication and facilitation skills
- Good written and verbal skills, fluent English.
The role will have no direct line reports, but task management responsibilities within project or services may occur.
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.
