Applied AI Engineer

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and meaningful equity

Full benefits

High-trust, high-ownership environment

Rapid growth in scope and responsibility

Job summary

Becoming, based in San Francisco, is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to develop software and data systems for their biological intelligence platform. This role involves collaboration with scientists and engineers to create innovative systems that analyze experimental data and build predictive models.

The ideal candidate will contribute across various domains including software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and data management, ensuring reliability and efficiency in a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• At least 1 year of industry experience.
• Strong proficiency in modern frontend technologies.
• Strong backend experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop production-grade software systems.
• Build and maintain large-scale biological data pipelines.
• Improve organizational cybersecurity posture.

Skills

Frontend technologies (e.g., React, TypeScript)

Backend technologies (e.g., Python, Go, Rust)

Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Databases and data architectures

Education

BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field

Job description

About Becoming

Becoming is building Developmental Intelligence: AI for predicting how organisms change over time.

Most experimental systems fail when metabolic demands become too high. We are building systems that don’t — by tightly integrating hardware, biology, and software into platforms that operate continuously over long time horizons.

Software is the connective tissue of this platform. It turns physical systems into controllable, observable, and ultimately predictable systems.

The Role

We are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to help build the software, infrastructure, and data systems that power our biological intelligence platform.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, AI infrastructure, data engineering, and scientific computing. You will work closely with biologists, machine learning researchers, and automation engineers to create systems that transform experimental data into predictive models of living systems.

You will contribute across the stack—from laboratory data ingestion pipelines and cloud infrastructure to internal tools, model‑serving systems, and user‑facing applications.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy building practical AI systems and are excited to work on technically challenging problems in biology.

What You’ll Own

• Software Engineering
  • Design and develop production‑grade software systems
  • Build internal applications and scientific tooling
  • Develop APIs and backend services
  • Build and maintain web applications and dashboards
  • Create systems for experiment tracking and data visualization
  • Improve software reliability, testing, and deployment processes
• Data & AI Infrastructure
  • Build and maintain large‑scale biological data pipelines
  • Design systems for ingestion, storage, transformation, and retrieval of multimodal biological data
  • Develop infrastructure supporting AI model training and evaluation
  • Optimize data movement between laboratory systems, cloud environments, and computational pipelines
  • Improve dataset quality, lineage, reproducibility, and governance
  • Support model serving and inference infrastructure
• Cloud & Platform Engineering
  • Design and maintain cloud infrastructure
  • Improve scalability, reliability, and observability of internal systems
  • Manage containerized and distributed workloads
  • Build deployment and CI/CD systems
  • Support high‑performance computing and GPU infrastructure
  • Optimize cloud utilization and cost efficiency
• Security & IT
  • Improve organizational cybersecurity posture
  • Manage identity and access controls
  • Implement security monitoring and incident response processes
  • Support device management and endpoint security
  • Develop data security and compliance practices
  • Help establish security standards appropriate for sensitive biological and AI data
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration
  • Work closely with scientists to understand data generation workflows
  • Partner with machine learning researchers to support model development
  • Collaborate with automation and hardware teams on laboratory integrations
  • Translate scientific requirements into scalable software systems

Who You Are

You are someone who:

• Operates with high agency — you see gaps across the stack and take ownership of fixing them
• Takes responsibility for end‑to‑end product outcomes, not just individual components
• Brings high energy to building robust, usable, real‑world software
• Acts with high integrity — you care about correctness, reliability, and clarity
• Communicates directly and clearly, especially when tradeoffs or failures arise
• Is self‑aware about your strengths and gaps, proactively fills them and open to feedback

Required

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related field
• At least 1 year of industry experience
• Strong proficiency in modern frontend technologies (e.g., React, TypeScript, or similar)
• Strong backend experience (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, Node, or similar)
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs, services, and data models
• Comfort working with time‑series data and stateful systems
• Strong understanding of databases and data architectures
• Familiarity with Linux environments and software deployment
• Thrives in startup fast pace and high intensity environments

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity depending on experience level
• Full benefits
• High‑trust, high‑ownership environment
• Rapid growth in scope and responsibility