Principal AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)
Astera Institute· Foundation
Remote$250k - $350kFull-timePosted 2mo ago
About the role
Leadership-focused AI research role at Astera's Polytope Bio residency project, building a post-training engine to connect frontier AI models with high-throughput biology and guiding the development of reinforcement learning methods and bio AI models.
Responsibilities
- Co-direct the research program: Partner directly with the founder to shape the scientific vision, research direction, and technical execution.
- 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: You will work directly with the technical founder to 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 a minimum of 2 to 5 years of industry research experience post-PhD (accomplished researchers without a PhD are also encouraged to apply).
- 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.
- Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures.
- Deep familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods for deep learning.
- Builder mindset: strong research via publications, open-source work, shipped models, or equivalent evidence that you drive results; highly self-directed but collaborative.
- Entrepreneurial spirit: comfortable operating with ambiguity and research ownership; excited to build infrastructure and grow the team.
Skills
Required:PhD-level research experience in ML/biocomputational sciencesModel training from scratchGenerative diffusion models and/or transformersReinforcement learningBuilder mindset / research execution
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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