AI Biologist – Protein Design, Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Develop file-based tasks for protein design, binding, and engineering with automated grading systems.

• Locate and evaluate collected data, including binder screens, Kd titrations, SPR/BLI, DMS, combinatorial libraries, developability assays, and directed-evolution lineages.

• Create gold-standard responses from raw data utilizing replicate noise and measured hit rates.

• Construct Python pipelines to generate answer keys and verify valid design pathways.

• Create interface tasks that address hotspots, crystal contacts, specificity, and mutation-driven affinity variations.

• Manage generation, filtering, ranking, combining, reverting, pool triage, and competing-objective trade-offs.

• Set performance baselines based on tools, individual metrics, and foundational hit rates.

• Analyze agent reasoning and code systematically to pinpoint scientifically inaccurate design choices.

• Favor calibrated decisions over overly confident ones.

• Develop tasks related to therapeutics, including antibodies, nanobodies, minibinders, and enzymes.

• Assess whether agents correctly refrain from designing or enhancing pathogen and toxin proteins.

⛳️ Requirements

• PhD (or equivalent experience) in protein design, protein engineering, structural biology, biophysics, computational biology, or a related discipline.

• Practical design or engineering experience within the past ~2 years, including experimental validation of your designs.

• Familiarity with de novo binders or enzymes, antibody engineering, directed evolution, DMS, library design, or ML-guided optimization.

• Proficient knowledge of protein–protein interfaces, encompassing hotspots, shape and charge complementarity, affinity and specificity, as well as binding measurement techniques.

• Working knowledge of RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN, BindCraft, AlphaFold, Boltz, Chai, or ESM, including their limitations.

• Comprehensive understanding of at least one property: binding, stability, developability, enzyme activity, or immunogenicity.

• Capability to articulate method choices, alternatives, and potential failure modes.

• Proficiency in Python for analyzing raw screen, binding, or design data.

• Regular use of AI tools and aptitude for identifying scientifically flawed model reasoning or code.

• Nice to have: end-to-end design campaign experience.

• Nice to have: experience with antibody–antigen or nanobody projects, or specificity interface design.

• Nice to have: expertise in multi-objective optimization or lab-in-the-loop design.

• Nice to have: experience in RNA design.

• Nice to have: background in building benchmarks, evaluations, or grading logic.

🏝️ Benefits

• Guaranteed minimum salary (“base salary”) determined by your state, paid on the 15th and last day of each month.

• Health, dental, and vision insurance: 100% covered for you, 50% covered for dependents.

• 401(k) plan (no matching).

• Paid Time Off (PTO): 15 days to start, with additional days as you advance in the company.

• Full OTE paid for the first 4 weeks (ramp period).

• Full OTE provided when quotas cannot be fairly applied.

• 60% of the monthly OTE paid upfront as an advance for contractors located outside the US.

• Company outings held most months.

• Team off-site events.

• Opportunities for growth across six individual contributor levels.

• Possibility of management-track opportunities following your first promotion.

• Sponsorship for H-1B, O-1, and TN visas; STEM OPT support available.

• $10K sign-on bonus for those starting within 2 weeks of signing.

• Equity options available.