Houston, Texas / Austin, Texas / Remote

DataJoint is seeking a Neuroscience Data Engineer skilled in building AI-powered computational data pipelines for scientific applications in modern cloud environments. This is a unique opportunity to join our team to scale up our existing solutions and invent new capabilities to support life sciences research, biotech, and drug discovery. If your interest is at the intersection of data, computation at scale, artificial intelligence, and scientific research, this job is for you!

About DataJoint

DataJoint is the leader in powering data-intensive neuroscience research. Our mission is delivering data integrity, speed, and scalability for labs engaged in grand scientific challenges such as reverse engineering the brain. Our platform defines and operates configurable research pipelines: orchestrating computing, managing change, and safeguarding reproducibility of results. It’s anything but a black box. Our applications combine intuitive tools for coding, data processing, analysis, and collaboration with uncompromising transparency and flexibility to customize and adapt every aspect of an experiment to the needs of science.

About the Role

As a Neuroscience Data Engineer, you'll join a team dedicated to making science truly scalable. You'll collaborate directly with leading global research labs (e.g., Harvard, JHU, Princeton, UCL) to understand their unique scientific needs. Leveraging DataJoint's expertise in streamlining research workflows, you'll lead projects to design and develop robust computational pipelines using the DataJoint framework and modern technology stacks. This role involves driving innovation in best practices for data-intensive scientific research, optimizing processes and open-source tools for scalable cloud and high-performance computing environments. You'll work closely with our internal team of engineers, neuroscientists, and data scientists, ensuring standardization and operational efficiency. Your contributions will be vital to productizing and commercializing new scientific tools and products, ultimately empowering groundbreaking research.

Key Responsibilities:

• Collaborate on Data Architecture Design: Partner with renowned neuroscience research teams worldwide to design data analysis methods and computational workflows for neuroscience experiments.
• Project Leadership: Lead and manage projects that support customer research in neuroscience and related disciplines.
• Product Development: Coordinate with the Engineering and Product teams to productize new scientific capabilities, enhancing the company’s suite of scientific offerings.
• Algorithm Optimization: Design and optimize algorithms specifically for the analysis of neural data.
• Customer Engagement & Training: Visit customer sites and attend scientific conferences to learn new techniques and train scientists in data management and analysis.
• Advanced Data Solutions: Work with internal software and data engineers to develop and deploy advanced data solutions.
• Documentation & Dissemination: Create comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and presentations.
• Promote Reproducibility: Champion principles of reproducible research within the scientific community.
• Stay Current & Innovate with AI: Continuously monitor scientific and technological advancements, actively leveraging the latest AI tools and techniques for biomedical data science to enhance insight extraction and interpretation from biomedical data, and formulate new solutions.

Required Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Neuroscience, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Exceptional communication skills, including presentations, group collaboration, and writing clear tutorials and manuals.
• Strong customer listening skills with an intuitive grasp of core needs, enabling meaningful conversations to discern, advise, and address client requirements effectively.
• Strong project management skills, including the ability to track, prioritize, and execute tasks and projects with a team to achieve high customer satisfaction.
• Demonstrated proficiency in data analysis and coding, including Python, MATLAB, and other relevant languages.
• Proficiency in scientific or numerical methods and visualization programming packages in Python (e.g., SciPy, NumPy, Pandas, Plotly, Matplotlib).
• Experience with statistical methods, signal and image processing, and machine learning.
• Strong knowledge and keen interest in neuroscience methods or similar domains.
• A penchant for creative problem-solving and compelling visual communication.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in systems neuroscience, neuroimaging, behavioral neuroscience, or similar fields.
• Experience in client services and/or scientific consulting.
• Experience with agile software development practices in a high-tech startup environment.
• Experience with relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL).
• Experience with containerization technology (e.g., Docker).
• Experience with cloud computing and cloud services, particularly AWS.
• Experience with methods for data acquisition and analysis in neurophysiology experiments or equivalent.
• Experience with AI tools development or integration - e.g., Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Model Context Protocol (MCP), multi-agent systems, etc.
• Proven track record of leading, managing, and executing large-scale, highly collaborative research projects.
• Ability to work independently while remaining well-coordinated with team members, demonstrating the intuition to prioritize tasks for high-impact results.

What We Offer

As part of DataJoint, you’ll be an integral part of a rapidly growing startup at the forefront of neuroscience. You can expect:

• A flexible work environment open to remote work (some team members work in our Houston office two days per week). The team periodically meets together for joint work – once every 2-3 months.
• An agile and collaborative product and engineering team.
• Working alongside leading neuroscientists, AI researchers, and engineers with hands-on experience.
• The opportunity to impact the future of neuroscience research.
• Flexible work arrangements and the tools you need to be successful, including a MacOS, Windows, or Linux laptop (based on your preference).

Our Backstory

As an expert data architect pursuing a Ph.D. in neurophysiology, Dimitri Yatsenko invented the DataJoint framework to support his research in the lab of Dr. Andreas Tolias at Baylor College of Medicine. DataJoint introduced a new database model, augmenting the traditional relational database with formal computational dependencies. He launched DataJoint as an open-source project in 2011, and co-founded the company in 2016 to develop solutions and services for data-driven team science.

DataJoint’s software is trusted by over 100 neuroscience labs around the world. Our work is supported by BRAIN Initiative grants from the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”), including the open-source DataJoint framework and library of neuroscience components (U24NS116470) and our commercial managed service for collecting, analyzing, and sharing scientific data (R44NS129492). Please visit DataJoint.com.