Senior/Staff AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)
Astera Institute · Remote · Remote · Emeryville HQ ·
COMPENSATION
$200k – $300k
Listed on the employer's job board (Ashby)
- Senior/Staff level
- Remote possible
- RL + Generative AI
- $200k-$300k base
- Co-founder potential
Polytope Bio, a residency project at the Astera foundation, aims to close the loop between frontier AI models and high-throughput biology. You will join the foundational team to build post-training engines that use real experimental measurements as reward signals for generative biology applications.
The role offers significant compute resources and financial runway. You will work hands-on to develop new modeling approaches and potentially evolve into a technical leadership or co-founding role in a future spinout.
What you'll do
- Drive core research and execute scientific vision with the technical founder
- Design post-training methods using biological measurements as reward signals
- Architect model training infrastructure and debug training loops
- Partner with experimental teams to align lab measurements with model learning
What you'll need
- PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or related field preferred
- 1-2 years of post-PhD research or industry experience
- Experience training models from scratch and debugging training runs
- Hands-on work with generative diffusion models or transformer architectures
- Familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference optimization
Nice to have
- Familiarity with protein modeling, sequence models, or structural biology
- Experience scaling training infrastructure on large GPU clusters
Stack
- Generative Diffusion Models
- Transformer Architectures
- Reinforcement Learning
- GPU Clusters
How you'll work
- Preference for NYC or SF Bay Area co-location
- Remote work possible for the right candidate
- High-velocity startup environment
What you get
- Base salary between $200,000 and $300,000
- Potential equity via future co-founding role
- Comprehensive health, vision, and dental insurance
- Company sponsored retirement plan
- Access to significant compute resources and financial runway