Norstella is a group of prominent pharmaceutical solutions providers – Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, The Dedham Group and Citeline – that help clients navigate complexities at each step of the drug development life cycle, from pipeline to patient. For more information, please visit Norstella.com.
Evaluate is a global company providing outstanding market intelligence services for the Pharmaceutical, Medical Device, Financial and Consulting sectors, through the Evaluate Pharma®, Evaluate Medtech®, Evaluate Omnium and Evaluate Vantage® online brands. Our international clients in Pharma and Biotech, Medtech, Banking and Consultancy regard Evaluate Pharma® as the industry’s gold standard for timely and accurate analysis of reported drug sales, consensus sales forecasts, R&D pipeline, markets and comprehensive company financials.
THE TEAM
At Norstella, we use data science to enrich, analyse and provide detailed insights on the pharmaceutical landscape. We do not just sell raw data; we deliver answers you can act on.
The Data Science Department consists of several teams: Strategic Intelligence, Market Access, Clinical, and Consulting, all of which are mature and well-functioning teams. However, the core of Norstella is the acquisition of data. This area is a significant investment for the business, and we have ambitious plans over the next three years to develop a new content ingestion platform (called Fusion) to unify our content teams across five different business units. We are building this to be AI-first, where the human team role will be to correct and train the ML models to improve performance over time. As such, we are looking for a leader to manage a new DS team within the department focused on this core part of the business.
SCOPE OF THE ROLE
We are looking for an experienced and capable leader to build and develop this team:
- Work with the Head of Data Science to ensure the practices and methodologies are aligned with the group;
- Manage the team of NLP data scientists already in the business;
- Develop and build out the roadmap for achievable and productive projects during your first few months as you speak to others in the business;
- Expand the team to include technical business analysts, ML engineers and related roles within the Content team to support the roadmap;
- Inherit and improve the existing DS frameworks we have developed for NER (drugs, companies, diseases, routes of administration, and other terms);
- Work with the engineering team to make these algorithms available in UI interfaces for data ops;
- Work with ML Engineers to make active learning and continual improvement a core part of this process.
How You’ll Succeed
Our goal is to smooth patient access to life-saving therapies. We can’t do this without high quality data to provide to our customers in the pharmaceutical sector, and to drive our product-facing data science algorithms.
We are currently rebuilding our process to collect this data, using a blend of sources both public and proprietary. This is a green-field build, so you will not be constrained by legacy processes or code.
Our sources include biomedical research documents, company trading updates and annual reports, web crawlers, clinical trial documents, and pharmaceutical claims data from the US covering hundreds of millions of lives.
You will work with the Fusion team initially to apply the existing techniques and frameworks we have to this ingestion process, while learning about any gaps in our capabilities. As a next step, you will hire additional people to fill those gaps and start working on the roadmap you will have laid out.
You will build a high performing team, manage projects to successful completion as well as mentor data scientists to develop their skills and ensure their approach to the projects is robust and reliable. You will be expected to be hands-on, review their code and methodology as well as help them present their work to the broader data science team. Each project will require metrics to describe performance, and have a plan for improvement in the future, once more ground-truth data is returned from the human curators.
Requirements
WHAT IT TAKES
Essential:
- A degree in a relevant field, such as computer science, mathematics, data science or a related field;
- Extensive data science experience including NLP experience;
- Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to think strategically;
- Understanding of pharmaceutical lifecycle;
- Proven experience of building and managing high-performance data science teams;
- Expert level Python skills;
- Passion for and knowledge of the cutting edge in data science, as well as proven traditional NLP methods;
- Experience of deploying ML models in the cloud, particularly AWS;
- Being detail-oriented and highly organised – an effective planner;
- Great communication skills, in particular for finding opportunities and shaping new research and DS services for the business.
Personal attributes:
- Commercial mindset;
- Ability to learn and adjust quickly;
- Ability to shape the team and role as the business continues to develop;
- Passion for communicating the art of the possible within Data Science, particularly language models.
Benefits
WHAT WE OFFER YOU
- 25 days holidays (increasing to 30 over 9 years) + 8 bank holidays;
- Value You day - one additional wellbeing day on top of your holiday allowance;
- Pension plan - company contribution of 6.7% rising to 10% after 12 months service;
- Life Assurance 4 x salary;
- Private Medical Insurance*;
- Corporate Gym Membership/Discount*;
- Flexible working and flexitime policies;
- Season Ticket Loan*;
- Cycle to Work Scheme*;
- Maternity, Paternity & Adoption leave – including enhanced leave for 2+ years’ service;
- Shared parental leave.
(*following successful completion of probation period)
Evaluate is an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age. Our ethos is to respect and value people’s differences, to help everyone achieve more at work as well as in their personal lives so that they feel proud of the part they play in our success.
We believe that all decisions about people at work should be based on the individual’s abilities, skills, performance and behaviour and our business requirements. Evaluate operates a zero-tolerance policy to any form of discrimination, abuse or harassment.