AI Scientist

Breakout Ventures; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Stock options

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Noetik is seeking a senior ML researcher to lead the development of foundation models that fuse biology and AI. You will publish, present at leading conferences, and collaborate with biologists and partners to push AI-driven drug discovery forward.

Join a highly technical, interdisciplinary team in a hybrid SF setting. You will train large models, evaluate novel architectures, and contribute to the growth of Noetik’s AI-first approach to oncology.

Qualifications

• Publications in top ML journals and conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML)
• Experience writing model architecture code and datasets in PyTorch; training and optimizing models
• Deep knowledge of modern ML architectures and self-supervised learning approaches

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and train foundation models that integrate biology across spatial scales and measurement modalities
• Identify meaningful benchmark tasks and evaluations for biology foundation models and evaluate open source alternatives
• Own research projects from conception to execution, communicate results to the team and partners
• Integrate with the AI x Bio community, present at conferences and contribute to writeups
• Evaluate use of LLMs to interface with internal foundation models and accelerate research
• Rapidly iterate on research ideas and choose high-leverage experiments

Skills

Publications & talks

PyTorch coding

DL architectures

Distributed systems

Tools

Ray / PyTorch Lightning

Job description

WHY NOETIK

NOETIK is a frontier therapeutics company harnessing AI to deeply understand human biology and redefine clinical outcomes in oncology. Leveraging the largest proprietary multimodal oncology dataset of its kind, uniquely integrating deep spatial profiling with routine clinical assays, NOETIK’s foundation AI models precisely match therapeutic targets to patient subpopulations and accurately predict clinical efficacy. This AI-first approach elevates therapeutic development from probabilistic guesswork to precision science.

THE OPPORTUNITY

At Noetik, you will work alongside a highly technical interdisciplinary team tackling hard and impactful problems. We are looking for folks that are excited to engage deeply, and also bring an immense urgency to make an impact.

In this role, you’ll work with a high-calibre team who are building systems and doing research at the forefront of AI. AI is at the heart of everything we do: we generate our own data purpose-built for machine learning, we build systems for serious machine learning research, we train large foundation models from scratch, and we center our drug discovery work on these models. Here, AI is not a buzzword, it’s the core of our company and the key to deciphering complex biology to make a difference for patients.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design, implement, and train foundation models that integrate biology across spatial scales and measurement modalities
• Identify meaningful benchmark tasks and evaluations for biology foundation models, and systematically evaluate open source alternatives
• Own research projects from conception to execution, communicate results to the broader team, make findings legible to biologists and partners, and collaborate with domain experts
• Integrate with the broader AI x Bio community, including presentations at leading conferences and contributions to writeups
• Evaluate the suitability of LLMs to interface with internal foundation models and accelerate research
• Rapidly iterate on research ideas, identify the highest leverage experiments to run, and make informed decisions with conviction

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Publications and presentations in leading journals and machine learning conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML)
• Experience writing model architecture code and datasets in PyTorch; training and optimizing models
• Deep knowledge of modern machine learning architectures and self-supervised learning approaches (autoencoders, diffusion, flow-matching, autoregressive decoders)
• Familiarity with training and inference in large-scale distributed systems, using tools like Ray/Pytorch Lightning and advanced parallelism approaches

Life@Noetik

Great science is a team sport. We are focused on creating a culture where brilliant people from different backgrounds can solve hard problems together. At Noetik, culture isn't just about perks; it’s about building a vibrant, collaborative community where everyone has the tools and the autonomy to thrive.

How We Work

Location & Collaboration: our primary lab and office space is located in South San Francisco. We operate as a hybrid organization, utilizing Slack, Zoom, and a modern tech stack to stay seamlessly connected regardless of time zone.

Intentional Connection: we believe that high-impact work requires intentional time together. We keep the team aligned through monthly All-Hands meetings and Quarterly Co-working Weeks at our South San Francisco office. Once a year, we gather for an Annual Reset - a week-long offsite dedicated to high-level strategy, collaboration and team bonding. Past locations have included Austin, TX, Park City, UT, and Boulder, CO.

Onsite Community: For team members working onsite, we foster a collaborative environment and refuel with daily catered lunches from great local restaurants and Boba Thursday - a small but meaningful tradition where we step away from our desks to connect over a break.

How We Support You

Health & Wellbeing: we provide generous health, dental, and vision insurance, with premiums fully covered for both employees and their dependents (depending on your plan choice). Our coverage is designed to be comprehensive and accessible, featuring modern care platforms like OneMedical, Midi Health, Spring Health, and XP Health. To further support your needs, we offer HSA and FSA accounts, dependent care savings, an EAP, resources for mental health (Rula), and health care navigation and advocacy (Rightway).

Time Off & Synchronized Breaks: we offer Flexible PTO to manage your personal time, alongside nine paid holidays. We also offer synchronized breaks so that the team can fully unplug simultaneously - two full-week company breaks (the first week of July and the last week of December), plus the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Compensation & Financial Benefits: our financial package includes a competitive base salary, stock options, and a 401(k) plan with an employer match. We provide a safety net through fully-covered disability, life and AD&D insurance, as well as generous parental leave. We also offer a suite of financial and lifestyle tools, including SoFi, Multiply Mortgage, and optional programs for pet insurance, legal services, and identity theft protection.

We believe that the highest performing teams include people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences who respectfully challenge each other. We are committed to an open, diverse and inclusive culture for all employees. Noetik is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, citizenship status, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, age, religion, creed, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, veteran status and any other characteristics protected under applicable federal, state and local laws.