Tik Tok’s parent company, ByteDance, is diversifying into the health industry. It will start hiring for its AI drug discovery team. At least five positions are open, which includes full-time roles and internship roles for Chinese candidates. The Company banks on its content algorithms and is seeking talent from Mountain View, Shanghai and Beijing.
The job posting by ByteDance reads that the Company is hiring candidates to conduct cutting-edge research on drug discovery and manufacturing fuelled by artificial intelligence algorithms.
The new recruits will join the ByteDance AI Lab, which was established in 2016 to cater to ByteDance’s content-services platforms. The lab extending itself to pharmaceuticals is unsurprising, as it can also benefit from machine learning that can power short video features.
Applicants for the drug-discovery research positions need to have at least a PhD degree in either mathematics, computer science, computational chemistry or biology.
The recruits will work on drug development in areas of design, identification and simulation.
Similar Chinese tech giants have also entered into the pharmaceutical space. Tencent has its own AI-driven drug team, under the company’s AI Lab, which has been actively publishing its findings since August 2019. According to a Reuters report dating back to September 2020, Baidu had planned to raise $ 2 billion for a new biotech start-up focusing on drug discovery and AI-driven diagnosis. Huawei had also dabbled in drug discovery and medical imaging through its cloud-computing unit.
