Data Scientist - Research Sovereign AI

Why Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is top-ranked in more specialties than any other care provider according to U.S. News & World Report. As we work together to put the needs of the patient first, we are also dedicated to our employees, investing in competitive compensation and  comprehensive benefit plans – to take care of you and your family, now and in the future. And with continuing education and advancement opportunities at every turn, you can build a long, successful career with Mayo Clinic.

Benefits Highlights

• Medical: Multiple plan options.
• Dental: Delta Dental or reimbursement account for flexible coverage.
• Vision: Affordable plan with national network.
• Pre-Tax Savings: HSA and FSAs for eligible expenses.
• Retirement: Competitive retirement package to secure your future.

Data Scientist Foundational Model Science

Position Summary

The Data Scientist for Foundational Model Science is the senior technical leader, and the lead scientist responsible for designing, training, and governing Mayo’s multimodal foundational model. This model forms the core intelligence layer used by clinical departments, researchers, agentic workflows, and sovereign AI collaborations. The individual will work as a hands-on architect, model-builder, and researcher while acting as a player–coach, guiding strategy and building a future team.

Key Responsibilities

Scientific & Technical Leadership

• Design multimodal foundational model architectures integrating signals from imaging, text, waveforms, structured data, graph representations, and temporal embeddings.
• Develop fusion, alignment, and cross-modal reasoning mechanisms (early fusion, late fusion, token-level fusion, hybrid models).
• Define and implement methods for grounded clinical reasoning, retrieval-augmented inference, graph-augmented attention, and chain-of-thought verification.
• Establish protocols for model lifecycle governance, safe update cycles, drift-aware re-training, and provenance tracking.

Hands-On Modeling & Training

• Train large-scale deep learning models, including multimodal architectures and domain-specific transformer-based systems, on real clinical datasets.
• Fine-tune and adapt large language models (LLMs) for clinical reasoning, summarization, question answering, agentic behavior, and instruction-following tasks.
• Build retrieval-augmented pipelines using embeddings, vector stores, graph traversal, and clinically grounded context construction.
• Develop evaluation methods for reasoning quality, temporal prediction accuracy, multimodal synergy, ablation-based robustness, and counterfactual behavior.
• Create reference-grounded training datasets, structured reasoning tasks, and multimodal benchmarks to evaluate model performance.
• Conduct hands-on experimentation with optimization strategies, large-scale distributed training, model quantization, and inference acceleration.
• Implement uncertainty modeling, selective prediction, abstention mechanisms, and clinically meaningful risk thresholds.
• Build interpretable reasoning pathways, cross-modal attribution maps, and reference-grounded explanations.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Work closely with the Representation team to ensure representation-model alignment.
• Partner with clinical SMEs to encode domain reasoning into reinforcement learning, preference optimization, or rule-guided behaviors.

Team Leadership

• Serve as the future founding technical lead of the Foundational Model Science Program.
• Mentor scientists and engineers and eventually build a specialty modeling team.

Required

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or related discipline  with at least four years of informatics, Artificial Intelligence, data science and/or machine learning.
• Experience with generative modeling, reasoning models, or multimodal foundation models.
• Expertise in alignment methods (contrastive learning, RLHF/RLCS, preference optimization).
• Experience with distributed training, and large-scale compute.

Preferred

• Experience with clinical or EMR data across multiple modalities.
• 7+ years experience training deep learning models, including transformers or multimodal architectures.
• Experience defining evaluation frameworks for reasoning, multimodal synergy, reliability, or fairness.
• Publications in multimodal learning, foundation models, or reasoning architectures.

Just as our reputation has spread beyond our Minnesota roots, so have our locations. Today, our employees are located at our three major campuses in Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona, Jacksonville, Florida, Rochester, Minnesota, and at Mayo Clinic Health System campuses throughout Midwestern communities, and at our international locations. Each Mayo Clinic location is a special place where our employees thrive in both their work and personal lives.  Learn more about what each unique Mayo Clinic campus has to offer, and where your best fit is.

Equal Opportunity

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, protected veteran status or disability status. Learn more about the "EOE is the Law" .  Mayo Clinic participates in  E-Verify and may provide the Social Security Administration and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security with information from each new employee's Form I-9 to confirm work authorization.