[Hiring] Senior Data Scientist @Axle

Role Description

Axle is seeking a Senior Data Scientist, Agentic AI Systems to join our vibrant team supporting rare disease research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is a Remote position within the United States.

Roughly 25 to 30 million people in the United States live with a rare disease. There are somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 distinct rare conditions, and the large majority have no FDA-approved treatment. Research on these conditions keeps running into the same obstacles:

• Published evidence for any one disease is thin and scattered across sources.
• The same clinical finding gets written down a dozen different ways depending on who recorded it.
• Patients and their families are usually the least equipped to read the specialist literature written about their own condition.

In this role, you will build the conversational AI systems that sit between a person and the research infrastructure. These are multi-turn workflows that:

• Ask sensible follow-up questions in plain language.
• Capture the answers as validated structured data.
• Hand that structure off to the searches and analyses doing the scientific work.

The emphasis is on systems people can rely on, confirming every interpretation before it is saved and logging every automated decision for later review.

This is a senior individual contributor position. You will own major components from design through deployment, work directly with NIH program staff, clinical geneticists, and rare disease information specialists, and help set the engineering standards for how AI gets applied on this team.

Core Responsibilities

• Build agentic AI systems for rare disease research workflows, including conversation logic and confirmation steps.
• Model outputs in Pydantic and use structured output and tool calling.
• Write, version, and regression test the prompts behind clinical and scientific reasoning tasks.
• Build evaluation for tasks that have no single right answer.
• Keep multi-step LLM workflows responsive under load.
• Log system actions and reasoning behind automated choices.
• Work out what researchers, clinicians, and patient communities need, and turn it into data models and system behavior.
• Contribute to manuscripts, conference abstracts, and posters with NIH investigators.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics, or a related field. An advanced degree is preferred.
• At least 5 years building and operating production software or data systems.
• At least 2 years should involve shipping LLM-powered applications.
• Experience with structured output and tool or function calling.
• Experience evaluating systems that have no single right answer.
• Ability to own a service end to end, from schema design through deployment and operation.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust Security clearance.

Technical Skills

• Python, with FastAPI, Pydantic, and pytest.
• LLM application engineering: provider APIs and gateways, prompt and context design.
• PostgreSQL, including work with embeddings or vector search alongside relational data.
• Asynchronous and concurrent Python, plus streaming results to a client.
• Containers and Kubernetes.
• Git-based collaboration and CI/CD in a shared codebase.

Preferred Skills

• A typed agent framework such as Pydantic AI, LangGraph, or the OpenAI or Anthropic agent SDKs.
• LLM tracing and evaluation tooling such as Langfuse, LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, or Braintrust.
• Serving open-weight models in production with Ollama or vLLM.
• Biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies.
• Background in rare disease, clinical genetics, or translational research.
• Experience working alongside clinicians, curators, or patient advocacy organizations.
• Published or presented work that explains your engineering.
• Prior or current NIH experience.

Benefits

• 100% Medical, Dental & Vision Coverage for Employees
• Paid Time Off and Paid Holidays
• 401K match up to 5%
• Educational Benefits for Career Growth
• Employee Referral Bonus
• Flexible Spending Accounts:
• Healthcare (FSA)
• Parking Reimbursement Account (PRK)
• Dependent Care Assistant Program (DCAP)
• Transportation Reimbursement Account (TRN)

Salary Range

$130,000 — $150,000 USD