A day in the life of a Machine Learning Engineer at Healx

In this series, we spotlight different people in our team at Healx and learn what a typical day at Healx is like for them.

In this article you'll learn about Marlene Staib's day, who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Healx.

09:30

"I know, I start pretty late compared to most of my colleagues; but hey, something has to stay consistent and that was the time I got started during pre-COVID office times. When I go to the Healx office, I leave around 8:20 for my London-Cambridge commute - otherwise, commute time is rebooked into lie-in-bed-and-brace-for-the-day time."

10:00

"I join one of our regular team standups. I take the opportunity catch up with my closest collaborators to see how far everyone got with their work. Yesterday, I discovered that one of the machine learning models I trained for producing automatic text annotations gave some unexpected but interesting results, and I use this as an opportunity to get some quick feedback and ideas from the team."

10:30

"This morning I’ll test out a few of the models I trained with different settings and compare the annotations they produce. Sometimes a small difference in how the biomedical papers I use are preprocessed can make a big difference in the results we find, so it is important to assess these methods carefully on a range of test data sets."

13:00

"One of my favourite things about working from home is that I get to have lunch with my partner. He's a software engineer as well, so we'll discuss different technical problems, how our days are going, a joke someone made in standup today, or how technology will save the world. Today it's how tech can help fight climate change."

14:00

"I have a meeting with a cross-functional team of biocurators and Natural Language Processing (NLP) experts to discuss a project for creating our own internal rare disease NLP data set. I really like this kind of work because I can learn about rare disease biology, work with smart people from diverse backgrounds, and create something very valuable that will help us find better treatments for rare diseases."

17:00

"I'm most productive when I’m in the middle of writing code - once everyone is logged out of Slack and it’s just me and my IDE from now on. On other days I just organise my todo list for the next day before closing my laptop for some classic paper-on-paper-reading time. It's important for me to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in my field, which helps me come up with new ideas for improving our systems."

18:30

"I'm quite sociable and try to get out in the evenings after work. You'll often find me wall climbing, playing squash, meeting friends for a drink or cooking up elaborate meals. This evening I pop out for my standard lockdown walk, where I encounter an old friend of a different kind: a duck perched on top of a nearby water fountain, where it is regularly spotted by keen photographers!"

At Healx we’re a diverse team of talented people working to revolutionise the way rare disease treatments are discovered and developed. If you would like to join our team, check out our open roles.