AI Structural Biologist — Remote, Ground‑Truth Expert

LatchBio; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Catered lunch and dinner daily

Waterfront office in Mission Bay

Monthly parking

Job summary

LatchBio is seeking an AI Biologist to serve as the scientific authority on ground truth in structural biology. You will test whether AI agents reason like experts, distinguishing real structural signals from artifacts across data collection, interpretation, model building, validation, and analysis workflows.

The role spans molecular systems, experimental and computational methods, and involves building benchmark tasks and datasets for viral and bacterial proteins, toxins, RNA elements, and

Qualifications

• PhD in structural biology, biophysics, biochemistry, or related field.
• Hands-on structural experience: you have built and validated models yourself, and you know what a good and a bad map, model and fit look like.
• Deep expertise in at least one area (X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM, NMR/solution methods, or computational structural biology) and working fluency across the others.
• Coding for structural data: you can compute contacts, superpositions, symmetry mates, map values and geometry from files without a GUI.
• AI-ready from day one: daily use of Claude, Cursor, or similar agents, with the judgment to spot where model reasoning is technically correct but scientifically unsound.
• Confidence to overrule an AI agent when the evidence demands it, and the openness to update when shown wrong.

Responsibilities

• Define expert reasoning for a structural question and write gold-standard answers with defended rationale.
• Design realistic scenarios across data collection, map interpretation, model building, validation and state assignment.
• Curate datasets across modalities like X-ray maps, cryo-EM maps, AlphaFold predictions, MD simulations, NMR shifts, SAXS curves, and cross-linking.
• Build analysis pipelines in Python (gemmi, Biopython/biotite, numpy) that compute ground truth from files.
• Partner with software engineers to turn judgment into new workflows.
• Test whether agents distinguish real structure from artifact or over-interpretation: unsupported ligands, register shifts, mirrored maps, etc.
• Adjudicate ambiguous cases: decide what the map supports, what experts would disagree, and what extra data would settle calls.
• Test whether agents choose the right representation and comparison for the question: assembly vs. asymmetric unit, reference state, domain alignment.
• Interrogate agent reasoning step by step and challenge conclusions that wouldn’t survive peer review.

Skills

Deep expertise in X-ray crystallogra

Cryo-EM

NMR/solution methods

Computational structural biology

Education

PhD in structural biology, biophysics, biochemistry, or related field

Tools

Gemmi

Biopython

Biotite

NumPy

Job description

LatchBio is seeking an AI Biologist to serve as the scientific authority on ground truth in structural biology. You will test whether AI agents reason like experts, distinguishing real structural signals from artifacts across data collection, interpretation, model building, validation, and analysis workflows.

The role spans molecular systems, experimental and computational methods, and involves building benchmark tasks and datasets for viral and bacterial proteins, toxins, RNA elements, and