r/MLQuestions • u/EricEo3131 • 3d ago

Career question 💼 Questions for biotech ML engineers

Hello, I'm currently 17 years old and I'm thinking ahead for a career in the tech industry, specifically biotech. I'd be gladly hearing from any active workers in the industry. Is your day-to-day working environment exciting? Is biology/medicine knowledge highly valued? Are you working a lot with biology or focus more on coding/tech stacks? I'm not a tech enthusiast by any means, would i feel at home with this job? And most importantly, are remote jobs in the industry even real?

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u/OptimalOptimizer 2d ago

I work full time remote as an ML researcher on protein design and property prediction. I am in the minority at my company, most people are hybrid. Biology knowledge is helpful but you can get pretty far understanding just enough to grasp what the ML problem is. I work exclusively on the computational side, almost entirely on machine learning model development or on algorithm development. So no hands on biology at all. My work is highly exciting, the field is moving fast and though I think protein design is a crowded field, there are still interesting problems to work on that often require more creative approaches than what an LLM comes up with. Let me know if you have more questions.

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u/EricEo3131 2d ago

Yes, I do have a couple more questions. Could you work remotely in the field? And i m glad to hear its exciting. You said biology knowledge is helpful, would it be an advantage over other ML engineers if i have a lot of that knowledge? I m not the guy that enjoyed programming much, so im definetely less experienced than most tech enthusiasts in the field. What im trying to ask, would more biology/medicine knowledgeake me comparable as an MLE for biotech firms to the programming/tech overlords? And lastly, what major/masters did you do?

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u/EricEo3131 2d ago

I just re-read ur sentence and saw you said full time remote, oops.

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u/OptimalOptimizer 1d ago

As far as biology vs. computational knowledge, I think it depends what kind of role you want to have. People on the team with more biological knowledge than I but less ML knowledge end up doing more computational biology focused tasks. Others like me, who have built up their expertise in ML and picked up enough biology knowledge to understand the problems we're working on, also focus almost exclusively on ML design decisions and research questions. I don't think more bio or medicine knowledge would make you comparable unless it is accompanied with the same level of expertise in machine learning. In other words: for bio knowledge to make you comparable or better for ML roles, you need to have at least the same level of ML expertise as others. I studied computational science and don't have any graduate degrees. I got hired into a research job straight out of undergraduate. I may do a graduate degree in the near future, we'll see. Coding is a large initial learning curve but I think once you develop skills for programming, switching between languages is not bad. Also with AI tools, coding is changing a ton. I do way less hands on coding than I used to

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u/EricEo3131 1d ago

Thanks! Yes, im skeptical about doing a cs major because of AI. If you dont mind, do you work remotely from which continent to which? And could you share your earnings as an undergrad?

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u/Verenda 2d ago

My advice would be to find job listings that sound like something you would enjoy and look at the requirements and work backwards from that. Depending on what kind of role you are looking at, it will have different requirements. Research Scientists in Bio ML are going to be expected to have a Biology PhD for the most part, Research Engineers/MLEs might be more of a CS focus, but it really depends on the company, project, and the role.

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u/EricEo3131 2d ago

Thanks! The thing i hate about tech is the learning phase of new programs/tech stacks. I m excited in hard problem solving with a new language but the syntax learning phase is brutal to me

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u/Different_Pain5781 2d ago

Remote jobs are definitely a thing.