Astera

<h2>About Astera:</h2>Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ugc" href="http://astera.org/vision"> astera.org/vision</a>.<h2>About Prism:</h2>Prism is making protein motion measurable, predictable, and actionable. Proteins are always moving, and that movement drives their function: binding, catalysis, allostery, selectivity, and mutational effects all emerge from conformational ensembles, the distribution of states a protein moves between. Yet most structural data rests on static snapshots that capture form, not function, because motion has been hard to measure and interpret. As a result, we lack critical levers to correct proteins in disease and engineer them for new purposes. Prism is building open, usable tools, methods, and infrastructure to study protein dynamics from experimental data, and applying them to pressing biological questions, including binding affinity, enzyme engineering, and explaining pathogenic variants. Prism sits with Radial, Astera’s Life Sciences Division.<h2>About Radial:</h2>Radial is Astera's life sciences division. We tackle foundational problems in biology while simultaneously prototyping better ways to fund, organize, and share research. Radial builds programs in-house, funds external teams, and designs partnerships in service of public-good science.<h2>Position Summary:</h2>The Astera Institute is seeking a full-time Senior Scientist, Ensemble–Function Mapping to lead a computational team that turns conformational ensembles into predictions of protein function. This growing team will develop methods that connect ensembles to allosteric coupling, catalytic efficiency, and binding specificity, and build the platforms and pipelines that test which structural data matter most. The goal is a landmark finding that links ensembles to function. This position reports to the Scientific Program Director.<h2>Responsibilities:</h2><ul><li>Lead Prism's research connecting conformational ensembles to function. Direct the scientific vision to predict and explain allosteric coupling, catalytic efficiency, and binding specificity, and drive that work toward high-impact findings.</li><li>Manage and mentor a team of multiple scientists and recruit additional hires with expertise in machine learning and statistical mechanics.</li><li>Work with the Scientific Program Director to determine strategy and prioritization of approaches, systems, and science within your team.</li><li>Partner with Prism's modeling and encoding team, alongside the Scientific Program Director, to ensure cohesion across the project.</li><li>Build platforms and analysis pipelines that measure how different types of structural data, and the ensemble models derived from them, change functional predictions. Validate them on well-chosen test cases.</li></ul><h2>Qualifications:</h2><ul><li>PhD in a relevant area; at least 4 years of work experience.</li><li>Experience managing a team of scientists.</li><li>Background in computational biophysics, with a record of research that connects protein structure or dynamics to function.</li><li>Experience with machine learning approaches that link protein structure to function.</li><li>Experience working extensively with at least one type of experimental structural data (X-ray, EM, NMR, HDX-MS).</li><li>An execution-forward approach. You move from hypothesis to working analysis quickly and let results guide the next step.</li><li>Clear communication with modelers, experimentalists, and external collaborators, including the ability to explain what a finding means and what it doesn't.</li><li>Nice to have: working knowledge of multiple experimental structural biology methods.</li><li>Nice to have: fluency in the mechanistic literature on allostery, conformational selection, and binding specificity.</li></ul><h2>Cultural Alignment:</h2><ul><li>Surprising problem-solver – you love finding unexpected solutions to problems we don't even know we have, and see options where others only see constraints.</li><li>Flexible by default – you don't draw hard lines around your job description and expect your role to evolve significantly over 6–12 months.</li><li>Bias to action – you launch and iterate on thoughtful experiments rather than waiting for perfect plans, and you're energized by novel problems.</li><li>High standards, internally driven – you believe you can build the world's best vehicle for unleashing extraordinary individuals to create public goods.</li><li>Open to feedback – you create opportunities to give and receive honest feedback, staying focused on both personal and team growth.</li><li>Operate with the highest levels of integrity, judgment, and stewardship — you treat peers and vendors with genuine respect for their time and contributions.</li><li>Embrace the tools that define great work today – Astera is building for an AI-driven future and equips the team accordingly.</li></ul><h2>Location:</h2>This position is on-site at our Emeryville, CA location. Some travel (~10%) will be required for in-person collaboration and presentations. Relocation packages will be considered.<h2>Compensation:</h2>This role's pay range is $200,000 – $250,000 per year based on experience, skills, and location.<h2> Benefits:</h2><ul><li>Top-tier health insurance plans with 99% of premiums covered by Astera for employees and dependents</li><li>Daily lunch that brings the full office together, plus a well-stocked fridge and pantry</li><li>Licenses for frontier AI tools and software</li><li>403(b) retirement plans, flexible paid time off, paid parental leave, commuter benefits, and health and dependent care FSAs</li><li>Visa sponsorship</li></ul><h2>Equal Opportunity Employment &amp; Accommodations</h2>Astera Institute is an equal opportunity employer and is invested in fostering a culture where everyone can thrive. We are committed to equity and inclusion, and we encourage women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, older members of society, and others from minority communities and diverse backgrounds to apply.Astera Institute is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in the job application and interview process. If you need an accommodation, please contact us at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="mailto:recruiting@astera.org">recruiting@astera.org</a>, and we will work with you to meet your needs.

Senior Scientist, Ensemble–Function Mapping

<h2>About Astera:</h2>Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ugc" href="http://astera.org/vision">astera.org/vision</a>.<h2>Position Summary</h2>Today's frontier biological AI models are trained almost entirely on static, pre-existing data. They are powerful pattern matchers, but lack feedback from real biology.Polytope Bio is a residency project at Astera that is building the missing piece: a post-training engine that closes the loop between frontier AI models and high-throughput biology. Our work will power new applications in generative biology by aligning frontier AI models directly to experimental measurements of what actually folds, binds, and functions.We are looking for a Principal AI Scientist to help launch our AI research program. You will be joining at the point of maximum leverage: early enough to shape the scientific direction, the modeling approaches, and the training strategy. The project is resourced with significant compute, financial runway, and the ability to generate large-scale prospective biological datasets. The researcher in this role will work hands-on to develop and publish new reinforcement learning methods and bio AI models leveraging datasets created by our unique high-throughput biology platform.Longer-term, we are seeking a candidate who is driven by the prospect of growing their leadership of the AI research program. While our immediate focus is on collaborative research strategy and execution, the candidate will have the potential to develop into a co-founding leadership position in the event of a successful spinout.<h2>Responsibilities:</h2><ul><li>Co-direct the research program: Partner directly with the founder to shape the scientific vision, research direction, and technical execution.</li><li>Develop RL feedback loop: Design, implement, and improve model post-training methods that translate high-throughput biological measurements into direct reward signals for biological language models.</li><li>Hands-on engineering: You will work directly with the technical founder to architect model training infrastructure and build, run, and debug models, training loops, and evaluation metrics.</li><li>Bridge wet/dry lab: Partner with the experimental team to ensure that what we measure in the lab and what the models learn are designed as a single, cohesive system.</li></ul><h2>Qualifications and Experience</h2><ul><li>Research Experience: PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field with a minimum of 2 to 5 years of industry research experience post-PhD (accomplished researchers without a PhD are also encouraged to apply).</li><li>Model Training: You have trained models from scratch, not just fine-tuned or called APIs. You have owned real training runs, know where they break, and know how to debug them.</li><li>Modern Algorithms: Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures.</li><li>Reinforcement Learning: Deep familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods for deep learning.</li><li>Builder mindset: A track record of strong research via publications, open-source work, shipped models, or equivalent evidence that you drive results. You are highly self-directed but thrive in a tight-knit, collaborative founding partnership.</li><li>Entrepreneurial spirit: Comfort operating with ambiguity and research ownership. You are excited to build the infrastructure and grow the team.</li></ul><h2>Strong Pluses</h2><ul><li>Familiarity with biological research (protein modeling, sequence models, structural biology, or adjacent areas).</li><li>Experience building and scaling training infrastructure on large GPU clusters.</li><li>Past team management and technical leadership experience.</li></ul><h2>Location</h2>Preference for candidates able to co-locate in NYC or SF Bay Area. Remote work is possible for the right candidate.<h2>What we offer</h2><ul><li>Compensation: Base salary of $250,000 to $350,000 during the residency.</li><li>Upside: The potential for a co-founding leadership role in a future spinout, contingent on project success and mutual fit.</li><li>Scientific Impact: Authorship of high-impact open-source datasets, methods, and models</li><li>Resources: Significant secured runway and dedicated GPU resources.</li><li>Unique Environment: A rare combination of frontier ML work directly coupled to a purpose-built, high-throughput experimental engine.</li><li>Comprehensive Benefits: Full benefits package including health insurance, a company sponsored retirement plan, vision, dental, and more.</li></ul>

Principal AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)

Company OverviewAstera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.Position SummaryResearch Scientists in Theory &amp; Computation at Astera Neuro develop and lead research programs aimed at understanding the representations and dynamics underlying conscious access, and at converting that understanding into the ability to steer the system. The work sits at the intersection of cognitive theory, large-scale neural data, and machine learning, and draws on recordings from our primate, rodent, and human programs. The opportunity here is to create an entirely new theoretical framework for how the brain builds an internal model of the world, on data of a scale, breadth, and quality that has not previously existed.Computation sits at the vital core of Astera Neuro. The role is built around tight coupling with experiment; models are expected to make testable predictions, and to propose the next experiment rather than wait for it. Title and scope are calibrated to track record.Successful applicants will focus on one or more of Astera Neuro’s primary research tracks, with background and interest helping determine the best fit. Some positions suit scientists with a bent for modeling large-scale neural data, extracting structure from recordings that span many areas, sessions, animals, and species. Others suit scientists with a more theoretical bent, concerned with abstracting the key computational principles out of the data and into new NeuroAI architectures. We welcome computational scientists trained outside neuroscience; backgrounds in control theory, robotics, theoretical physics, statistics, and machine learning are all highly valued here.What You’ll Do<ul><li>Build models of compositional neural representation, grounded in cognitive theory and fit to recordings: how the brain binds content to variables, composes structured thought, and updates it.</li><li>Build coupled dynamical-systems models of the interactions between multiple brain areas, and test them against simultaneous multi-area recordings.</li><li>Analyze the fixed-point structure of these systems and characterize the landscape of stable states underlying percepts, thoughts, and internal states.</li><li>Derive how to sculpt inputs, using our optogenetic and electrical stimulation technology, to drive the system to chosen stable points, and validate those derivations in closed-loop write-in experiments.</li><li>Stitch data together across subjects and species into foundation models of neural activity, registered onto a common whole-brain functional and anatomical atlas.</li><li>Propose and help design new experiments: identify the measurement or perturbation that would most sharply separate competing models, and work with the experimental teams to run it.</li><li>Abstract key computational principles from the data into new NeuroAI architectures, in some cases in direct collaboration with Astera AI.</li><li>Mentor research engineers and, at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.</li><li>Contribute to publications, talks, open data and tooling releases, and engagement with the broader scientific community.</li></ul>Who You AreRequired:<ul><li>PhD with 3-12+ years of experience in computational neuroscience, neuroscience, physics, statistics, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, control theory, robotics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience. Graduate work or research experience in neuroscience is a plus but not required.</li><li>Demonstrated ability to lead a computational or theoretical research project end to end, from question and formulation through implementation, analysis, and publication.</li><li>Depth in dynamical systems, including fixed-point and attractor analysis, stability and bifurcation structure, and the fitting of dynamical models to noisy, partially observed data.</li><li>Strong computational skills, with fluency in Python and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX, and comfort with large-scale data pipelines.</li><li>Hands-on experience analyzing large-scale neural datasets from electrophysiology, two-photon imaging, or comparable methods, including high-density recordings such as Neuropixels and modern spike-sorting and quality-control pipelines such as Kilosort.</li><li>Ability to work at close quarters with experimental neuroscientists, software engineers, and hardware engineers in a fast-moving, multi-team environment.</li></ul>Preferred/Nice to Have:<ul><li>Experience with latent-variable and state-space models of neural population activity, such as GPFA, LFADS, switching state-space models, or recurrent network models fit to data.</li><li>Background in control theory, optimal control, or robotics, particularly as applied to steering high-dimensional systems toward target states.</li><li>Background in statistics or theoretical physics, with a serious interest in applying it to neural systems.</li><li>Experience designing or implementing real-time or closed-loop decoders and model-guided stimulation.</li><li>Experience with foundation-model and self-supervised approaches applied to neural or behavioral data, and interest in the correspondence between artificial and biological representations.</li><li>Contributions to open-source neuroscience or scientific computing projects.</li></ul>What We Value<ul><li>Conviction that the brain’s internal model can be understood in full, and recognition that getting there requires a kind of science no single academic lab can do.</li><li>Appetite for building theory rather than applying it: the framework that explains how a physical system converges on a stable internal model of the world doesn’t yet exist, and we’re looking for people who want to build it.</li><li>Willingness to be held to an engineering standard: our decisive tests are write-in experiments, not merely decoding. What we cannot build, we do not understand.</li><li>Comfort building on shared infrastructure rather than private projects.</li><li>Commitment to open science.</li></ul>Additionally Expected at Senior / Principal Level<ul><li>Track record of owning a modeling or theory agenda end to end, including framing the question, collaborating with experimentalists, and delivering results.</li><li>Experience making and defending modeling tradeoffs across interpretability, predictive accuracy, and experimental utility.</li><li>Comfort working across the stack, from data infrastructure and analysis pipelines through to theory and machine learning.</li><li>History of mentoring scientists or leading technical initiatives (Principal level).</li></ul>Why Join UsResearch Scientists in Theory &amp; Computation at Astera Neuro, focused on answering the hardest and least understood questions in neuroscience: how the brain generates thoughts, intelligence, and consciousness. We seek to understand the compositional structure of neural representations and the dynamics that give rise to conscious access, and to build the theory that explains how a physical system converges on a stable internal model of the world.Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion!

Research Scientist, Theory & Computation

<h2>Company Overview</h2>Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.<h2>Position Summary</h2>Research Scientists at Astera Neuro develop and lead research programs aimed at understanding how the brain builds a model of the physical world, forms new thoughts, and creates a stable model of the self. The goal is enough understanding and technical ability to precisely and reversibly modulate each of these functions through write-in experiments.The role requires both the ability to independently drive a research program from start to finish and to collaborate closely with a diverse team of scientists to collect novel datasets that can transform our understanding of the neurobiology of intelligence and consciousness. Experimental work combines large-scale neural recordings, targeted stimulation, and behavioral design, working closely with computational, engineering, and software teams to translate biological insight into a detailed model of the brain that can guide causal perturbation experiments and inform new AI architectures. Title and scope are calibrated to track record.Successful applicants will focus on one or more of Astera Neuro’s primary research tracks. Background and interest will help determine the best fit among programs aimed at discovering how the primate brain builds a stable model of the physical world, how it generates a model of its own physical and mental states and plans, and how it combines abstract representations of thoughts into new configurations to support complex, flexible behavior.<h2>What You’ll Do</h2><ul><li>Design behavioral paradigms (perceptual and cognitive tasks) aligned with the lab’s scientific goals.</li><li>Design and execute large-scale, multi-area neural recording experiments in awake, behaving subjects performing complex perceptual, working-memory, and higher-cognitive tasks, using high-density Neuropixels probes, chronic polymer probe arrays, two-photon imaging, and holographic optogenetics.</li><li>Design and execute write-in (causal perturbation) experiments targeting visual percepts, thoughts, and internal states using model-guided closed-loop stimulation.</li><li>Build and analyze datasets that stitch across sessions, animals, and paradigms to support stable, brain-wide, single-neuron-resolution representations.</li><li>Collaborate across electrophysiology, holography, computational, and engineering teams to keep recording, perturbation, and modeling tightly coupled.</li><li>Mentor research technicians and, at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.</li><li>Contribute to publications, talks, open data and tooling releases, and engagement with the broader scientific community.</li></ul><h2>Who You Are</h2><h2>Required</h2><ul><li>PhD with 5-12+ years of experience in neuroscience, cognitive, behavioral, or medical sciences, biology, biomedical engineering, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.</li><li>Hands-on experience with chronic, multi-area, large-scale electrophysiology in awake, behaving animals performing complex cognitive paradigms, including high-density Neuropixels recordings and chronic polymer probe systems.</li><li>Demonstrated ability to lead a systems neuroscience project end to end, from hypothesis and paradigm design through rig development, data collection, analysis, and publication.</li><li>Strong quantitative and computational skills, with fluency in Python and/or MATLAB, modern spike sorting and quality-control pipelines, and analysis of high-dimensional population data.</li><li>Ability to work at close quarters with software engineers, hardware engineers, and computational neuroscientists in a fast-moving, multi-team environment.</li><li>Experience with optogenetic, electrical, or other causal perturbation methods across multiple animal models.</li><li>Experience with closed-loop or real-time experimental control and stimulation.</li><li>Familiarity with neural population dynamics and dynamical-systems modeling.</li></ul><h2>What We Value</h2><ul><li>Conviction that the brain’s internal model can be understood in full, and agreement that getting there requires a kind of science no single academic lab can do; we’re betting on scale, deep collaboration across science and engineering, and open sharing of ideas in a full-stack environment.</li><li>Willingness to be held to an engineering standard. Our decisive tests are write-in experiments: constructing a specific percept, thought, or internal state, not merely decoding. What we cannot build, we do not understand.</li><li>Comfort building on shared infrastructure rather than private projects. Recordings and perturbations will be registered onto a common whole-brain functional and anatomical atlas, and datasets are designed to stitch across sessions, animals, and paradigms.</li><li>Care for the animals: the wellbeing of the animals we study, supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff, is the foundation of both the science and its credibility.</li><li>Commitment to open science. We will release tools, data, and methods, and aim to create a new dynamic of rapid, open exchange in neuroscience.</li></ul><h2>Additionally Expected at Senior / Principal Level</h2><ul><li>Experience contributing to or leading large, multi-team programs (academic centers, institutes, foundations, or industry research labs).</li><li>Track record of mentorship and technical leadership.</li></ul><h2>Why Join Us</h2>Research Scientists at Astera Neuro, focused on answering the hardest and least understood questions in neuroscience: how the brain generates thoughts, intelligence, and consciousness. We seek to understand the neural representation of the compositional code that underlies primates’ remarkable ability to combine abstract thoughts into new configurations, and we view both reading out and writing in thoughts and ideas as central to that goal.Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion!

Research Scientist

<h2>About Astera:</h2>Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ugc" href="http://astera.org/vision">astera.org/vision</a>.<h2>Position Summary</h2>Today's frontier biological AI models are trained almost entirely on static, pre-existing data. They are powerful pattern matchers, but lack feedback from real biology.Polytope Bio is a residency project at Astera that is building the missing piece: a post-training engine that closes the loop between frontier AI models and high-throughput biology. Our work will power new applications in generative biology by aligning frontier AI models directly to experimental measurements of what actually folds, binds, and functions.We are looking for a Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join our foundational team. You will be joining at the point of maximum leverage: early enough to influence the modeling approaches, experimental design, and training strategy. The project is resourced with significant compute, financial runway, and the ability to generate large-scale prospective biological datasets. The researcher in this role will work hands-on to develop and publish new reinforcement learning methods and generative AI models leveraging datasets created by our unique high-throughput biology platform.While our immediate focus is on hands-on research and rapid execution, there is potential for the right candidate to evolve into a co-founding technical or leadership role in the event of a future spinout.<h2>Responsibilities:</h2><ul><li>Drive core research: Work closely with the technical founder and team to develop and execute the scientific vision, develop cutting-edge modeling approaches, and iterate rapidly on new ideas.</li><li>Develop RL feedback loop: Design, implement, and improve model post-training methods that translate high-throughput biological measurements into direct reward signals for biological language models.</li><li>Hands-on engineering: You will work directly with the technical team to architect model training infrastructure and build, run, and debug models, training loops, and evaluation metrics.</li><li>Bridge wet/dry lab: Partner with the experimental team to ensure that what we measure in the lab and what the models learn are designed as a single, cohesive system.</li></ul><h2>Qualifications and Experience</h2><ul><li>Research Experience: PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field, with a minimum of 1-2 years of post-PhD research or industry experience (accomplished researchers without a PhD are also encouraged to apply).</li><li>Model Training: You have trained models from scratch, not just fine-tuned or called APIs. You have owned real training runs, know where they break, and know how to debug them.</li><li>Modern Algorithms: Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures.</li><li>Reinforcement Learning: Familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods for deep learning.</li><li>Builder mindset: A track record of strong research via publications, open-source work, shipped models, or equivalent evidence that you drive results. You are highly self-directed but thrive in a tight-knit, collaborative early-stage environment.</li><li>Entrepreneurial spirit: Comfort operating with ambiguity and a desire to build something new. You are excited to tackle hard problems and potentially transition into a technical co-founder in the future.</li></ul><h2>Strong Pluses</h2><ul><li>Familiarity with biological research (protein modeling, sequence models, structural biology, or adjacent areas).</li><li>Experience building and scaling training infrastructure on large GPU clusters.</li></ul><h2>Location</h2>Preference for candidates able to co-locate in NYC or SF Bay Area. Remote work is possible for the right candidate.<h2>What we offer</h2><ul><li>Compensation: Base salary of $200,000 to $300,000 during the residency.</li><li>Upside: The potential to evolve into a co-founding technical role in a future spinout, contingent on project success and mutual fit.</li><li>Scientific Impact: Authorship of high-impact open-source datasets, methods, and models</li><li>Resources: Significant secured runway and dedicated GPU resources.</li><li>Unique Environment: A rare combination of frontier ML work directly coupled to a purpose-built, high-throughput experimental engine.</li><li>Comprehensive Benefits: Full benefits package including health insurance, a company sponsored retirement plan, vision, dental, and more.</li></ul>

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Senior Scientist, Ensemble–Function Mapping

Principal AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)

Research Scientist, Theory & Computation

Research Scientist

Senior/Staff AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)

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