Staff Associate III

Columbia University
Biomedical Engineering
United States New York New York
apply.interfolio.com/178362

Description

The Department of Biomedical Engineering - Prof. Elham Azizi's Lab, is looking for a Staff Associate III to:

Functional Knowledge (35%) – Develop advanced probabilistic and causal generative frameworks linking molecular to clinical data; design interpretable representation spaces for tumor-immune dynamics and therapy response.

Technical Expertise (25%) – Engineer LLM and diffusion/flow-matching pipelines; integrate multi-GPU distributed training, experiment tracking, and MLOps automation.

Problem-Solving Skills (15%) – Innovate adaptive fine-tuning, multi-task learning, and agentic reasoning strategies to improve generalization and data efficiency.

Decision Making/Autonomy (10%) – Lead architectural and data design decisions; prioritize experiments aligned with program milestones; evaluate trade-offs between model accuracy and interpretability.

Communication Skills (10%) – Present findings at internal symposia and external conferences; co-author manuscripts; write high-quality documentation and technical reports.

Mentorship/Leadership (5%) – Mentor junior engineers and research assistants; provide guidance on causal inference methods and AI-in-loop experimentation.


Qualifications

B.S./B.E. (minimum) in Computer Science, Biomedical/Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Bioinformatics, Applied Math, or related field. MS or PhD degree is preferred but not required.

Required qualifications

• Substantial expertise in training deep learning models and tuning large foundation models.

• Expertise with developing efficient data loaders for large datasets and optimizing training workflows.

• Deep knowledge of probabilistic modelling, self-supervised learning and representation learning, diffusion/VAE/flow matching architectures

• Strong Python, PyTorch/JAX, containerization & MLOps skills; familiarity with distributed training and modern experiment-tracking stacks

• Experience with AI coding tools (e.g., Copilot, Cursor)

Preferred extras

• M.S. or graduate-level degree in relevant field

• Experience with single-cell and spatial genomic or imaging data, and multimodal integration

• Expertise in statistical causal discovery and inference

• Publications or open-source contributions in generative models

• Strong interest in applications and driving impact in cancer biology and immunology

6+ years of experience in software engineering including:

3+ yrs hands-on experience training generative AI or large-language models at scale

2+ years experience with statistical or generative modeling


Start date

December 09, 2025

How to Apply

Website