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About This Role
Overview:
Job Title: Computational Biologist (AI/ML)- Essex Management
Notice to Applicants: This is a Part-Time job.
Location
US Remote
About Essex
This position supports "Essex, an Emmes Company". Essex is a biomedical informatics and health information technology-focused consultancy founded in 2009 and headquartered in Rockville, MD. The Essex team comprises experts with extensive experience in strategically developing and managing complex health and biomedical information programs for clients in the Federal Government, research academia, and private sectors.
Primary Purpose
The Computational Biologist (AI/ML) is a role within the Bioinformatics Department of the BIDS Division at Essex. This role brings meaningful scientific and technical expertise to the design, execution, and delivery of bioinformatics work across federal biomedical research programs. The Computational Biologist (AI/ML) owns well-defined tasks and small projects with minimal supervision and contributes substantively to team problem-solving and scientific quality. This role specifically focuses on applying Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning to bioinformatic analysis, and thus the ideal candidate is expected to leverage traditional bioinformatic techniques as well as emerging techniques. Essex supports programs in precision oncology, cancer genomics, clinical data infrastructure, and translational research, and the Computational Biologist (AI/ML) is expected to bring scientific judgment and technical capability to the work, not just execution.
Responsibilities: Core Functions
- Own and execute well-defined analytical and technical tasks and small projects with minimal supervision from senior staff or your manager.
- Assist Associate Informaticists with task-related questions, troubleshooting, and orientation.
- Contribute substantively to team discussions on methodology, standards, tools, and technical decisions.
- Apply working familiarity with best practices in your domain to deliver scientifically sound, high-quality work products.
- Support peer review of deliverables and contribute to quality assurance activities.
- Contribute to team documentation, SOPs, and knowledge base materials.
- Shadow senior staff during candidate interviews to begin developing evaluation skills.
- Participate in internal training sessions, brown bags, and knowledge-sharing activities.
- Perform other related duties as assigned.
Role-Specific Functions
- Design and implement AI/ML models applied to biomedical data, including genomic, proteomic, and multimodal clinical datasets, to support precision oncology and translational research.
- Apply large language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques, and graph neural networks to make biomedical data interoperable and AI-ready.
- Develop, test, and optimize pipelines for variant calling and annotation leveraging modern ML workflows and frameworks.
- Curate, model, and integrate genetic and clinical datasets into standardized, interoperable formats to support precision medicine programs.
- Generate high-quality, interpretable reports for internal and external stakeholders that translate complex AI/ML outputs into actionable scientific and clinical insights.
Qualifications: Required skills
Core Skills
- Working proficiency in the core technical tools, analytical approaches, and data standards relevant to the assigned program and department.
- Ability to work independently and within a team in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.
- Strong written and oral communication skills, including the ability to document work clearly and present findings to technical audiences.
- Proficiency with Microsoft Office applications.
Role-Specific Skills Core Skills
- Proficiency in Python and SQL; demonstrated experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) and code versioning (Git).
- Strong background in machine learning and AI, including deep learning architectures (CNNs, GNNs) applied to biomedical or complex multi-modal datasets.
- Familiarity with genetic variant standards (HGVS, VCF) and clinical data ontologies.
- Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally and communicate technical results clearly to diverse scientific and clinical audiences.
Required experience
Core Experience
- Bachelor's degree or advanced degree in bioinformatics, computational biology, data science, genetics, biology, health informatics, clinical research, or a related field.
- 2 to 5 years of relevant professional or research experience.
Role-Specific Experience
- Demonstrated success applying AI/ML to biomedical or multi-modal datasets (genomics, proteomics, clinical).
- Track record of publications or applied innovation in AI-driven data science for life sciences preferred.
- Experience applying LLMs or RAG approaches to scientific or clinical data problems preferred.
Emmes Group: Building a Better Future for Us All
Emmes Group is transforming the future of clinical research, bringing the promise of new medical discovery closer within reach for patients. Emmes Group was founded as Emmes more than 47 years ago, becoming one of the primary clinical research providers to the U.S. Government before expanding into public-private partnerships and commercial biopharma. Emmes has built industry-leading capabilities in cell and gene therapy, vaccines and infectious diseases, ophthalmology, rare diseases, and neuroscience.
We believe the work we do has a direct impact on patients' lives and act accordingly. We strive to build a collaborative culture at the intersection of being both performance-driven and people-driven. We're looking for talented professionals eager to help advance clinical research as we work to embed innovation into the fabric of our company. If you share our passion for research, come join us.
#LI-Remote
Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At The Emmes Company, LLC, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
The Emmes Company, LLC AI Hiring
The Emmes Company, LLC has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Rockville, MD, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (531 positions) offer remote work, while 8,478 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,078 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,646 roles, $261,000 median); Los Angeles (1,486 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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