Openings.

Open Semester &
Master's Projects.

If you are interested in working on one of the projects listed below, please send an email to the projects’ contact in which you answer the following questions:

• Which project(s) are you interested in?
• Are you looking for a thesis or a semester project? Priority will be given to Master Thesis Projects (full-time)
• Why did these specific projects catch your attention?
• How much time could you spend on the project per week? How many classes are you planning on taking in addition to the project?
• Please attach your CV and links to projects you developed (e.g. GitHub repo)

The EPFL Digital Epidemiology Lab in Geneva, Switzerland, is looking for a Senior Web Application Developer (Full Stack Rails) to work on developing our food tracking platform MyFoodRepo as we expand internationally.

Built with the goal to revolutionize the role of nutrition in medical research and public health, the MyFoodRepo platform makes food tracking very easy, thanks to an AI-assisted mobile app and an annotation back-end that helps cohorts manage the food tracking of their patients. We’ve built a flexible infrastructure for our own research cohort at www.foodandyou.ch, and are now opening it to other cohorts.

This is a role where your work will potentially touch thousands of people every day in a central area of their health. We are looking for a team player who cannot only envision a better future, but has the skills and the experience to build it. You will be working in a research environment with a rapidly changing and iterative product development cycle.

The MyFoodRepo platform makes use of the FoodRepo database, which is also maintained by the Digital Epidemiology Lab. Thus, you will find yourself in the middle of an ecosystem of mobile apps, applications, databases, and machine learning pipelines. The key responsibility of this role is to ensure that the web applications on which this ecosystem is built are stable, continuously improving, and easy to maintain, use, and expand. In particular, this role serves to:

• Expand the functionality of the MyFoodRepo, FoodRepo, and Food & You platforms to allow rapid deployment of new cohorts and new services
• Develop new platform tools and features to enhance the user experience and communications between us, cohort managers, and users
• Scale our infrastructure to handle growth in traffic and data
• Integrate the results of our AI research into the platforms to support the user experience
• Ensure the stability, scalability, speed and robustness of the platforms
• Ultimately ensure a fantastic user experience for the cohort participants and patients

Prerequisites

Qualified applicants should have:

• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining large scale “commercial-grade” web applications
• Solid experience with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL
• Excellent front-end skills (HTML / CSS / JavaScript, ideally ReactJS)
• Broad experience with 3rd party integration and customization (e.g. Stripe, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Heroku, AWS, or similar)
• Demonstrated experience with testing frameworks
• Track record of operating production services in a dynamic environment
• An eye for design
• Ability to adapt and learn in a rapidly evolving technological field
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment where things can change very quickly
• Mastery of written and spoken English
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, written and oral
• Demonstrated ability to work both independently and in team-based environments

Other desirable qualifications include:

• Startup experience a plus
• Agile/Scrum/Lean experience a plus

As the team grows, we also except you to help us develop a culture of development best practices.

Contact Marcel Salathé

+41 21 695 52 06
marcel.salathe@epfl.ch

The Digital Epidemiology Lab uses machine learning and online & mobile technologies to build digital health applications. Together with our partners, we use these applications to tackle the health challenges of the 21st century.

Based in Geneva, Switzerland, we are recruiting a post-doctoral researcher in the area of Digital Epidemiology.

Required Skills and Expertise

Qualified applicants should have:

• Very good knowledge of written and spoken English (French is not required)
• Strong background in computational epidemiology or other computational fields
• Demonstrated experience in machine learning / natural language processing
• Strong analytical skills
• Good knowledge of Python; in addition, good knowledge in web technologies (Javascript, Rails) is an asset
• Education: a PhD degree in a quantitative science; a strong publication record in digital / computational sciences. Note that a publication record is not limited to papers in scientific journals only, but anything that is publicly accessible. We particularly like demonstrated expertise through shared code, shared data, and running online projects.
• Mission: The research efforts will primarily focus on our work with the digital epidemiology platform www.crowdbreaks.org that we built, and that uses machine learning to track, analyze and visualize health trends, from emerging pandemics to long-term developments such as vaccine hesitancy.

We offer:

• Ambitious projects of global prominence in digital epidemiology
• A young, dynamic, and international team
• Very good knowledge of written and spoken English (French is not required)
• A modern working environment in Geneva

As one of the highest-ranked technology institutes internationally, EPFL offers a thriving intellectual environment and outstanding facilities. Geneva and Lausanne are two beautiful and culturally active cities on the shores of Lake Geneva close to the Swiss and French Alps.

Application Submission: If you are interested in this position and believe that you qualify, please prepare a cover letter, a research statement (including, notably, how you would contribute to our activities), and a CV with a list of publications (see above). Please send your application as a single file, to marcel.salathe@epfl.ch. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted individually for interviews. For questions about this position, please write to: marcel.salathe@epfl.ch. Please mention "Application to post-doctoral position 2020" in the subject of your e-mail.

Starting date: to be agreed upon, but the earlier the better.