Founding ML Engineer

About the Role

As a Founding ML Engineer, you will work closely with the founders and a small, highly collaborative team to accelerate drug discovery using machine learning. This role offers a steep learning curve and the opportunity to have major impact across programs. You will help bridge ML models and in silico development with hands-on experimental scientists, shaping the future of drug design and development.

What You’ll Do

Identify high-impact bottlenecks across our drug discovery pipeline and develop targeted ML approaches to address them.
Build systems that support experiment planning, literature triage, protocol drafting, and in silico candidate screening.
Develop tools to automate work across the preclinical and clinical stack in close collaboration with wet-lab scientists and operators.
Fine-tune and apply protein and structure models, including ESM, AlphaFold-family models, RFdiffusion, and ProteinMPNN, on in-house data to generate and optimize candidates across programs.
Develop and implement methods for drug design, including candidate generation, filtering, in silico modeling, and predictive analysis. Relevant approaches may include molecular dynamics, post-training biomolecular models, and probe-based model evaluation.
Close the loop between in silico predictions and in vivo results using active learning methods.
Build internal evaluations that measure whether ML systems are accelerating drug development in practice.

Who You Are

You have, or are eager to develop, strong research judgment in biomolecular modeling.
You have, or are eager to develop, strong judgment about bottlenecks in end-to-end drug development.
You care about wet-lab reality and are excited to work closely with wet-lab scientists.
You take ownership of outcomes end to end: you can prioritize important problems, scope the necessary experiments, develop strong solutions, and present clear results.
You are curious and data-driven; you enjoy developing and testing hypotheses, and you update your views based on empirical evidence.
You are motivated to accelerate drug development.
Bonus: Experience or a strong project history in active learning, biological modeling in data-constrained regimes, or multimodal models spanning omics, imaging, and phenotypic data.
Bonus: Experience or a strong project history building production-scale agent platforms.

Pay and Benefits

$150,000–$300,000 salary, plus at least $50,000–$200,000 in equity options
Compensation will depend on your qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience
Visa sponsorship is available, if necessary
Wellness budget: $500+ per month for training, supplements, personal trainers, and resources to support your best self
Comprehensive healthcare options to choose the plan that best fits your needs

Application Process

Initial application
First phone screen
Second phone screen (~30 minutes)
In-person work trial in San Francisco

Apply Today

Applying takes just 5 minutes. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible. We are evaluating candidates on a rolling basis and want to make an offer quickly.

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Founding ML Engineer

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