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.