Position: Field Applications Scientist I, EMEA

Position Type: Full-Time

Department: Scientific Support

Location: DACH region (Germany / Austria / Switzerland). Remote. Must be close to a major airport (within 50 kms).

Experience: MS required; 4+ years experience in a Field Applications role 

Position Summary

Watchmaker Genomics (WMG) is inviting applications for the full-time position of Field Applications Scientist I, EMEA (remote) based in the DACH region.

This position reports to the Associate Director, Field and Automation Support and will be mainly responsible for providing field technical support for Watchmaker’s Next-Gen Sequencing (NGS) and precision enzyme product portfolios. This position will support the EMEA technical team by providing pre- and post-sales technical and scientific support, including presenting technical content to customers and distributors, co-travel with sales team members, attending and/or presenting at conferences and assisting with various marketing activities. This position is field based, with up to 75% travel within EMEA (potential for international travel outside EMEA). 

Prior experience with providing field application support is required. The successful candidate will be self-motivated, proactive, and thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced working environment contributing directly to our company culture and success.

The position is expected to have a deep technical understanding of our current product portfolio, maintain knowledge of current and new NGS products, workflows-associated applications, competitor products and NGS automation support offerings, and identify and escalate changes in the market dynamics. This position is also accountable for providing customer feedback on WMG products, in addition to identifying unmet customer needs that will enable the development of new and innovative products.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for providing pre- and post-sales technical and scientific support, both onsite and remote, for customers and distributors across WMG’s NGS and precision enzyme product portfolio. 
• EMEA-based travel (up to 75%) activities including co-travel with sales team members, meetings with key customers, providing training and troubleshooting, and participating in trade shows/conferences. Possible opportunity for further international travel.
• Provides deep product knowledge to solve customer challenges. Triages issues, troubleshoots investigations, and identifies solutions.
• Creation of training material, and presenting technical content to new or current customers or distributors.
• Inform and implement processes as a part of our EMEA-field based scientific support organization.
• Maintain expert-level knowledge of current and new NGS products and workflows, our precision enzyme portfolio and associated applications, competitor products and NGS automation support offerings. 
• Provide customer and market feedback on WMG products; Identify and communicate unmet customer needs that will aid in the development of new and innovative products.
• Work closely with the commercial team to identify and support collaborations with leading research institutions and industry partners to accelerate the sales cycle, including both pre-sales and post-sales troubleshooting. 
• Support marketing activities including generation of customer-facing technical content (i.e. posters, app/tech notes, white papers, webinars) as well as participating in and presenting at trade shows/conferences.
• Participate in sales, marketing, and product strategy meetings when appropriate. 
• Follow best practices and documentation requirements for customer-related activities and events in CRM.
• Additional duties as required within the remit and responsibilities of the role.

Required Qualifications and Experience

Relevant experience providing field-based applications support for next-generation sequencing (NGS) experiments and/or other advanced genomics applications. Relevant experience includes working in high-throughput sequencing labs developing, optimizing and troubleshooting NGS workflows both manually and on automated platforms and managing large sequencing projects. 

Qualified candidates will have a proactive approach with a can-do attitude, and be great communicators with a high level of self-motivation. Candidates will also have a strong desire to continually improve, learn and collaborate to help WMG stay at the forefront of exciting new applications spaces. Candidates will be able to demonstrate a high standard experience to our customer base, excel in the art of troubleshooting, and take ownership and pride in their work.

Candidates will have the courage to initiate discussions with customers to challenge the current "status quo" and have the confidence to drive change and adoption of new concepts. Full product training will be provided.

The following skills and experience are requirements for the position:

• MSc in Genetics, Molecular Biology, Biochemistry or related field
• 4+ Years experience within NGS field applications 
• Advanced knowledge of and practical experience with experimental design, applications/assay development, NGS library preparation, PCR, qPCR, good lab practices, and troubleshooting. Automation knowledge of NGS assays is a plus. 
• Ability to travel up to 75% of time 
• Strong customer consultative skills which includes application of scientific knowledge and analysis, exceptional customer engagement, and fostering of customer relationships
• High self-motivation and must have demonstrated ability to work in a collaborative team environment
• Experience with CRM software (particularly Salesforce.com) highly desirable
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Fluent in English (required), multiple languages is a plus (German, preferred)

Application Requirements 

To apply for the position, please submit the following in a PDF format on watchmakergenomics.com: 

• Letter of motivation (upload where it says cover letter)
• Resume or Curriculum vitae, highlighting relevant qualifications and experience

Applications without a Letter of Motivation will not be considered.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and the position will remain open until filled; however, early submission is encouraged as review will begin immediately.

If selected to participate in the interview process, the names and contact information of three professional references who are able to assess your suitability for the position in terms of the specified requirements will be requested.

*** NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES PLEASE

We are only accepting direct applications for this position. We are not working with external recruiters or agencies at this time. Unsolicited resumes or candidate submissions from third-party recruiters will not be considered and will be deemed the property of Watchmaker Genomics.

*** WE ARE AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER

Watchmaker Genomics is committed to being an equal opportunity employer and creating a culturally diverse environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability status, age, or veteran status or any other characteristics as protected by applicable law..

This position may be subject to pre-employment checks, including driving history check, drug screening and a background check for any convictions directly related to its duties and responsibilities. All pre-employment checks will comply with all applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Role

As a Senior Research Scientist in the Applied Research team, you conduct applied research and design innovative algorithms in the space of geometric computer vision and image/video/vision-centric foundation models for deployment in industrial robotics at scale. In this role you define processes and develop approaches in Deep Learning that mitigate the risks of hallucinations, improve accuracy and deploy algorithms on industrial robotics workcells to gauge sim-to-real transfer of models. As a Senior Research Scientist at Intrinsic you provide input and guidance for the development and generation of synthetic data and annotations required for training foundation models at scale based on the identification of gaps in the sim-to-real transfer of models. You also work with Research partners and cross-disciplinary engineering teams to ideate new approaches and architectures to bring state of the art foundation models to real-world industrial applications. Constant learning and exploration of unfamiliar technologies is also part of this role. 

How your work moves the mission forward

Your work can play a significant role in democratizing access to advanced AI skills to the average user in robotics and enhance the credibility of deploying AI models at scale in industrial settings. As part of your day-to-day work: 

• You are insightful and innovative, proactively identifying needs and bottlenecks based on customer problems and proposing practical solutions that are deployable in high throughput environments.
• You serve as the nexus between the robotics team and our research partners—collaborating with them, providing engineering insights into research projects, and ideating practical next generation solutions. 
• You serve as an advisor to the engineering and other cross-functional teams providing critical guidance in terms of translating early (AI-powered) research capabilities into robust engineering capabilities in Flowstate (Intrinsic’s software platform for robotics solutions).
• You continually keep abreast of the latest developments in deep learning, AI, machine learning, perception to ensure that Intrinsic can continually keep evolving its advanced capabilities over time.
• Document and develop the prototype fully so it can be shipped to external users. 

In all the above, you will work closely with a sub-team within the R&D division, but will also frequently collaborate with other engineering, and product groups within Intrinsic.

Skills you will need to be successful

• Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related technical field with a high degree of passion for robotics and foundation models and a strong inclination towards accelerating the deployment of such models in practical industrial manufacturing applications.
• 3 years of experience in robotics software development or research (work on your PhD can count towards this).
• Proficiency programming in Python and at least one of the ML/DL frameworks such as PyTorch, Jax, and/or Tensorflow.
• Knowledge of robotics perception or manipulation algorithms.
• Experience working with robot hardware or simulation environments.
• A team player with a product mindset, a willingness to learn, and apply oneself to delivering value in practical real-world problems.

Skills that will differentiate your candidacy

• Advanced degree (Master's or PhD) in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• Expertise in deep learning, including transformer-based approaches for robotics, and other areas such as Learning from Demonstrations, Reinforcement learning.
• Proven ability to apply robotics ML/AI research to real-world problems and demonstrate tangible impact.
• Experience generating or utilizing synthetic data for machine learning in robotics.
• Publications in relevant robotics conferences or journals.

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Snapshot 

The Gemini Safety team is accountable for the safety and fairness behavior of GDM’s latest Gemini models. The role of the Research Scientist will be to apply and develop data and algorithmic cutting edge solutions to advance GDM’s latest user-facing models. The workstyle is fast paced, and highly collaborative. The team has a strong culture of support, dedication and collaboration.

About Us 

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

The role

We’re looking for a versatile Research Scientist, at ease both with figuring out how to approach new research questions, and the technical implementation of research ideas.

Our team focuses on advancing the safety and fairness behaviour of state of the art AI models. We drive the development of the foundational technology adopted by numerous product areas including Gemini App, Cloud API, and Search.

Key responsibilities:

• Post-training / instruction tuning state of the art LLMs, focusing on text-to-text, image/video/audio-to-text modalities and agentic capabilities
• Exploring data, reasoning and algorithmic solutions to make sure Gemini Models are safe, maximally helpful, and work for everyone.
• Improve Gemini’s adversarial robustness, with a focus on high-stakes abuse risks.
• Design and maintain high quality evaluation protocols to assess model behavior gaps and headroom related to safety and fairness.
• Develop and execute experimental plans to address known gaps, or construct entirely new capabilities
• Drive innovation and enhance understanding of Supervised Fine Tuning and Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning at scale

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Research Scientist in the Gemini Safety team,  we look for the following skills and experience:

• PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Significant LLM post-training experience.

In addition, the following would be an advantage: 

• Experience in Reward modeling and Reinforcement Learning for LLMs Instruction tuning
• Experience with Long-range Reinforcement learning
• Experience in areas such as Safety, Fairness and Alignment
• Track record of publications at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML
• Experience taking research from concept to product
• Experience with collaborating or leading an applied research project
• Strong experimental taste: Good judgment regarding baselines, ablations, and what is worth testing.
• Experience with JAX