Data Science Returnship

Your work will change lives. Including your own.

We are leveraging new technology to create virtuous cycles of learning around datasets to build a next-generation biopharmaceutical company. Its complex biology decoded.

Recursion is a digital biology company industrializing drug discovery. We are working to solve some of the hardest most meaningful problems facing human health today. Come join us in our mission to decode biology to radically improve lives while doing the most impactful work of your life.

Recursions Returnship Program

Our Returnship program is sponsored by the Women at Recursion Employee Resource Group. The program is aimed at helping those who have taken a hiatus (2 years) from the STEM industry have the opportunity to return to the workforce in a learning environment with support from teams and mentors. This allows our company to tap into an underutilized pool of talent in Utah and leverage the experience and skills of previous work and life experiences while also providing opportunity to learn and develop experience in new cutting-edge tools and technology. This sixteen-week program will enable you to have ownership of projects that can deeply impact the companys mission to radically decode biology and serve patients while having the guidance support and mentorship has you re-enter the workforce. Each Returner will be assigned a mentor who will meet with them weekly as well as weekly seminars on workplace culture communication and technology.

Our returner program lasts 4 months running from February 2026 through the end of May 2026 with potential for transition into full-time employment depending on performance and availability. This position is mainly based in our Salt Lake City UT headquarters with some hybrid working flexibility available.

Data Science & Applied Machine Learning Returnship

Working alongside Recursions Nomination Workflows team you will engage with a cross-functional group having expertise in biology chemistry data science and engineering. This team is responsible for the first two stages of Recursions drug discovery pipeline where we generate novel hypotheses and identify promising chemical matter. We accomplish this by building and operating a scalable semi-automated computational system that mines our data for new & interesting starting points for our discovery portfolio. All work in this team directly contributes to improving the quantity reliability quality and confidence of our early-stage program starting points.

Projects on this team include:

• Program Advancement: Partner closely with biologists and chemists to advance specific early-stage programs through exploratory data analysis and experiment evaluation.
• Method Development: Analyze and improve our semi-automated evaluation systems through exploratory data analysis method development and deployment of new data analysis methods or metrics.
• Platform Improvements: Maintain update and improve our scientific code-bases to harden our systems improve observability accelerate development and enable new capabilities and automations.

The Experience Youll Need

This role is for individuals who have been on a career hiatus of 2 years from the STEM industry. We are seeking candidates with a strong foundational background and a passion for learning.

• A strong foundation in either:
  • applying probability statistics and machine learning to real-world datasets
  • developing scientific software workflow orchestration or data-engineering
• Familiarity with the Python data stack (e.g. numpy pandas scikit-learn).
• Prior experience in collaborative software development including version control tools like git.
• The ability to critically review python code whether authored by peers or LLM coding agents.
• An aptitude for breaking down complex problems into manageable parts and clearly communicating project objectives & progress to a diverse team.
• Nice to have:
  • Experience analyzing biological or high-dimensional datasets.
  • Familiarity with workflow orchestration systems (e.g. Prefect).
  • Experience accelerating & improving code development with coding agents

The Recursion Community

While we offer cutting-edge tools the secret sauce is our people. Our organization structure and culture isnt driven by politics or ego it is designed first and foremost to help you do your best work. We live and work by values that we see as the strategic differentiators that give us a competitive advantage allowing for better and faster work that isnt predicated on burnout and encourages us to make leaps where others take steps. This is a place where people in every role and every level make the bold bets that create large leaps forward on a regular basis!

The Perks Youll Enjoy as a Returner Recursionaut

• Paid sick pay and additional flexibility as needed.
• Complimentary chef-prepared lunches and well-stocked snack bars (Salt Lake City).
• One-of-a-kind 100000 square foot headquarters complete with a 70-foot climbing wall showers lockers and bike parking (Salt Lake City).
• Weekly Returners Skill Development Classes.
• 1:1 Weekly Mentorship with a member of your team and a member of the Returnship ERG.

#LI-DB1

The Values We Hope You Share:

• We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking take calculated risks and push boundaries but never at the expense of ethics science or trust.
• We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up speaking honestly and taking action.
• We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment test and refine embracing iteration over perfection.
• We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isnt about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
• We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability we enable trust and autonomyleaders take accountability for decisive action and teams own outcomes together.
• We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust clarity humility and impact. Through sharing we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate support one another spend our time make decisions and celebrate collectively.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generate one of the worlds largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly and massive computational scale owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world Recursion is uniting technology biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City where it is a founding member of BioHive the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto Montréal New York London Oxford area and the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at or connect onX (formerly Twitter)andLinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin age disability veteran status or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal state local or provincial human rights legislation.

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursions internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.