Pod Lead - Scientific Computing Expert - Life Science PHD

Hello,

Greetings from ZettaMine!!!

Freelancing Opportunity: We are hiring a POD Lead Scientific Computing Expert (Life Sciences PhD) for a short-term Frontier AI Research, Computational Biology & Scientific Evaluation.

LinkedIn profile is mandatory to apply.

Location: India

Role: POD Lead Scientific Computing Expert (Life Sciences PhD)

Educational Eligibility: PhD, postdoctoral experience, or equivalent research experience in Life Sciences, Medicine, or a closely related discipline, with strong computational and scientific programming expertise.

Mode: Remote - Freelancing

Start: Immediate

Mandatory Eligibility Criteria

Technical Qualification:

• PhD, postdoctoral, or equivalent research experience in Life Sciences, Medicine, or a closely related field, with demonstrated computational and scientific programming expertise.
• Strong scientific programming skills, particularly in Python.
• Previous experience working as a POD Lead in similar projects, leading and mentoring technical trainers.
• Expertise in at least one area, such as Bioinformatics, Computational Genomics, Systems Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Biostatistics, Computational Drug Discovery, Structural Biology, Protein Engineering, or Computational Microbiology.
• Ability to independently validate scientific reasoning, research methodologies, computational workflows, and analytical outputs.
• Experience reviewing scientific datasets, analysis pipelines, reference solutions, computational environments, and automated tests.
• Strong understanding of scientific accuracy, statistical methods, reproducibility, data validation, and computational evaluation.
• Ability to identify incorrect assumptions, analytical errors, unreliable results, and weaknesses in automated grading systems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to provide clear, actionable technical feedback.
• Experience mentoring trainers, reviewing deliverables, maintaining quality standards, and ensuring timely project delivery.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with bioinformatics tools such as Samtools, BCFtools, GATK, BWA, STAR, Salmon, DESeq2, edgeR, Seurat, Scanpy, or Biopython.
• Familiarity with scientific workflow tools such as Nextflow, Snakemake, Docker, Conda, Git, and high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
• Knowledge of computational drug discovery and structural biology tools such as RDKit, OpenMM, GROMACS, AutoDock Vina, or PyMOL.
• Familiarity with medical imaging, clinical research, biostatistics, or biomedical data analysis tools.
• Experience designing scientific benchmarks, research challenges, or computational evaluation tasks.
• Prior experience in AI training, AI evaluation, or scientific research projects is an added advantage.

Availability

• Minimum 40 hours per week.
• Availability to work at least 8 hours per day.
• Minimum 4 hours of overlap with PST business hours.
• Immediate availability for a 3-week contract assignment.

What Youll Work On

• Lead and mentor a pod of approximately 510 technical trainers developing realistic, terminal-based scientific tasks for a frontier AI training and evaluation initiative.
• Design challenging, multi-step scientific workflows across computational biology, bioinformatics, medicine, and life sciences.
• Review scientific tasks end to end, including problem statements, biological and clinical datasets, reference files, computational pipelines, environments, reference solutions, and automated tests.
• Ensure tasks reflect authentic scientific research and clinical analysis workflows that require meaningful computational reasoning.
• Validate scientific methods, statistical assumptions, calculations, code, intermediate outputs, and final results for accuracy and reproducibility.
• Verify that computational pipelines use appropriate tools, reference databases, genome builds, annotation versions, and software dependencies.
• Evaluate outputs such as variant calls, differential gene expression, cluster assignments, protein structure metrics, survival estimates, model performance, medical image segmentation, and pharmacokinetic parameters.
• Review automated graders to ensure they assess scientific correctness and analytical quality rather than merely checking output formatting.
• Ensure tasks are reproducible and executable in controlled computational environments, with appropriate testing and validation procedures.
• Identify flawed scientific assumptions, incorrect calculations, unreliable tests, hard-coded outputs, and other evaluation weaknesses.
• Ensure datasets are appropriately licensed, public or synthetic, and de-identified, with no protected health information or unauthorized restricted-access data.
• Screen tasks for biosafety and dual-use concerns and escalate potentially harmful biological content when necessary.
• Provide actionable written feedback, track revisions, and ensure quality issues are resolved before task approval.
• Onboard trainers, allocate tasks, monitor productivity, resolve technical blockers, and maintain consistent delivery standards.
• Maintain documentation covering task guidelines, recurring issues, quality expectations, and best practices.

Offer Details

• Employment Type: Contractor assignment (no medical or paid leave).
• Contract Duration: 3 weeks.
• Expected Start: Immediate / next available project start.
• Working Hours: Minimum 40 hours per week, with at least 4 hours of overlap with PST.

Interested Candidates: Please share your updated CV and LinkedIn profile at karthik.k@zettamine.com and complete the registration and assessment process using the links above.

Thanks & Regards,

Karthik K

ZettaMine