[Hiring] Senior Data Scientist, AI Retrieval Systems @Axle

Role Description

Axle is seeking a Senior Data Scientist, AI Retrieval 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 retrieval and knowledge layer that those AI systems stand on:

• Develop disease and phenotype vocabularies for precise reasoning.
• Implement semantic search to find the right concept behind imprecise human phrases.
• Create ranking algorithms to determine what a user sees first.

This is a senior individual contributor position with unusual range. You will own:

• The data layer.
• The retrieval services built on top of it.
• The interfaces where results become visible.
• The path onto the computing infrastructure that runs it all.

You will work directly with NIH program staff, clinical geneticists, and rare disease information specialists.

Core Responsibilities

• Model biomedical knowledge for rare disease research.
• Ingest disease and phenotype ontologies into PostgreSQL with a maintainable release and refresh path.
• Reconcile identifiers across sources and determine clinically relevant terms.
• Build retrieval-augmented services that ground everyday language in clinical concepts.
• Treat retrieval as a database problem and tune keyword and vector search.
• Build ranking and relevance layers for user-facing results.
• Deliver user interfaces in Next.js, React, and TypeScript.
• Deploy continuously onto NIH on-premises and high-performance computing Kubernetes environments.
• Build evaluation metrics for retrieval and concept mapping.
• Log system actions for review and analysis.
• Work out needs of researchers, clinicians, and patient communities.
• 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 (advanced degree preferred).
• At least 5 years building and operating production software or data systems.
• At least 2 years should involve shipping LLM-powered applications.
• Experience building retrieval systems end to end.
• Experience evaluating systems with 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.
• PostgreSQL at depth, covering vector search, full-text search, and query tuning.
• LLM application engineering: provider APIs, prompt design, and structured generation.
• Data ingestion and transformation pipelines.
• Containers and Kubernetes for service deployment.
• Working comfort in Next.js, React, and TypeScript.
• Git-based collaboration and CI/CD in a shared codebase.

Preferred Skills

• Biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies.
• Grounding model output in domain terminology.
• Experience with Helm and deployment to on-premises or HPC Kubernetes environments.
• Serving open-weight models in production.
• Background in rare disease, clinical genetics, or translational research.
• Contributions to an open biomedical resource or standard.
• Published or presented work explaining engineering concepts.
• 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