Research Assistant

at  California Institute of Technology

JOB SUMMARY

The Research Assistant in Scientific Computing will work at the AI+Science Lab led by Prof. Anima Anandkumar at Caltech, a mission-driven multi-disciplinary environment creating cutting-edge AI methods and applying them to a wide range of scientific domains ranging from weather/climate modeling, material design and manufacturing, protein design, and autonomous drone flights.
The Research Assistant is responsible for gathering accurate, credible information on a subject and summarizing their findings to support senior research staff in scientific and academic fields. Their duties include browsing archives for information, completing literature reviews, and conducting research interviews. The successful candidate will perform a variety of duties to help with the publication of work.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Applied Math, or a related field.
• 2 years of relevant scientific research experience.
• Strong mathematical fundamentals and algorithms skills or experience.
• Excellent programming, debugging, performance analysis, and test design skills.
• Ability to work independently.
• Excellent communication and documentation habits.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Master’s in Computer Science, AI, Applied Math, or a related field.
• Moderate research project experience doing performance analysis and tuning.
• Moderate research project experience training large-scale foundation models, especially pipeline/model parallelism.
• Track record of creating HPC software for numerical methods.
• Domain expertise in areas like computational fluid dynamics, material deformation, wave propagation, etc.
• Familiarity with containers, numeric libraries, and modular software design.
• Experience doing performance analysis and tuning.
• Excellent C/C++ and Python programming skills.
• GPU programming would be welcome (CUDA).

• Maintaining quality control standards to preserve the integrity of data and findings.
• Scheduling and conducting interviews.
• Selecting a place to conduct interviews and getting permission from all participants.
• Analyzing data using various statistical methods.
• Writing reports to summarize data and the implications of the results.
• Researching information.
• Gathering accurate, credible information on a subject.
• Summarizing findings to support senior research staff.
• Browsing archives for information.
• Completing literature reviews.
• Preparing scientific equipment or setting up experiments to test hypotheses.
• Recording data or collecting samples in order to track the progress of experiments over time.
• Creating graphs, charts, tables, and other visual representations of data.
• Planning research projects.
• Writing proposals and grant applications.
• Developing statistical models.
• Analyzing data.
• Producing reports.
• Presenting research findings.