Job Information
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Software Engineer, Flavell Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Research Software Engineer, Flavell Lab
Job Number: 24121
Functional Area: Scientific Computing
Department: Picower Institute for Learning & Memory
School Area: Science
Employment Type: Full-Time
Employment Category: Exempt
Visa Sponsorship Available: No
Schedule:
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Job Description
RESEARCH SOFTWARE ENGINEER, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory-Flavell Lab, to support ongoing research aimed at understanding how activity across an entire nervous system gives rise to animal behavior. Will manage a diverse set of data acquisition and data processing pipelines integral to research progress in the lab. Responsibilities will include managing high-performance computing servers (Linux) and multiple systems for data acquisition (Windows/Julia); writing new software packages for high-performance acquisition of microscopy data and image analysis; gaining expertise in custom data processing packages developed in the lab (utilizing custom neural nets, GPU-accelerated code, Bayesian inference for statistics, and more) and training new lab members on utilizing these packages; and assisting lab leadership in writing research reports on the lab’s research progress. The Flavell Lab (https://flavell.mit.edu/) is an interdisciplinary research team that aims to understand how brain-wide activity is structured and gives rise to animal behavior. The group studies the roundworm C. elegans, which has only 302 neurons and a fully-described synaptic wiring diagram, providing a tractable system to understand the function of an entire nervous system.
Job Requirements
REQUIRED: bachelor’s degree in computer science, bioengineering, mathematics, or other engineering discipline; at least three years’ experience developing in Python and/or Julia; good documentation practices; demonstrated proficiency using NumPy and Python image processing libraries with big data/multiprocessing/distributed processing; experience with Linux (Ubuntu preferred) at the sysadmin level, GPU programming, and machine learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Jax); and version control experience (Git/GitHub). PREFERRED: master’s degree; basic familiarity with biology and/or neuroscience in order to help contextualize the computational tools being deployed and write reports about the research and the tools being developed; and some MATLAB experience. Job #24121 6/7/24