Senior/Staff AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)
Astera Institute· Foundation
Remote$200k - $300kFull-timePosted 2mo ago
About the role
Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join Polytope Bio, a residency project at Astera, developing a post-training engine that aligns frontier AI models with high-throughput biological measurements to enable generative biology applications. Role involves hands-on research, model training, RL feedback loop design, and collaboration with wet/dry labs, with potential to evolve into a co-founding technical/leadership position.
Responsibilities
- 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.
- 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.
- Hands-on engineering: architect model training infrastructure and build, run, and debug models, training loops, and evaluation metrics.
- 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.
Qualifications
- PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field, with 1-2 years of post-PhD research or industry experience (accomplished researchers without a PhD are also encouraged to apply).
- Experience training models from scratch (not just fine-tuning or using APIs) and owning full training runs.
- Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures.
- Familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods for deep learning.
- Strong research track record (publications, open-source work, shipped models, or equivalent) and ability to thrive in a collaborative early-stage environment.
- Entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to tackle hard problems, with potential for technical co-founder role in the future.
Skills
Required:Machine learning model training from scratchGenerative diffusion modelsTransformersReinforcement learning / preference optimizationResearch/publications/open-source
Nice to have:interdisciplinary collaboration
Benefits
- Full benefits package including health insurance, a company sponsored retirement plan, vision, dental, and more.
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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