Bioengineer, Lead Scientist

LatchBio

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 250,000 - 300,000

Full time

7 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Work Visa sponsorship

Flexible Spending Account

Team‑wide science reading groups

Health, dental, vision: 100% coverage

Relocation Assistance

Lunch and dinner provided every work d

Waterfront office in San Francisco

Professional development

Flexible working hours

Office dog

Job summary

LatchBio seeks a Bioengineer, Lead Scientist to spearhead benchmarking and task development, leading a team of up to seven scientists. You will co-design benchmarks, craft task rubrics, and ensure high-quality, transferable scientific outcomes while collaborating with product, engineering, and leadership.

The role emphasizes hands-on design, quality assessment, and strategic initiatives including data acquisition, roadmap planning, and hiring. Hybrid work with strong leadership expectations.

Qualifications

Experience leading a team of scientists (up to 7).
Ability to design benchmarks and graders for benchmarks.
Strong judgement of scientific value and clear writing.

Responsibilities

Benchmark co-design: map knowledge into a taxonomy of benchmarks and release for frontier labs to monitor and improve model performance.
Hands-on task design: design tasks and graders; set rubrics and standards for task quality.
Production and quality: manage volume and timelines per contract; adapt delivery type as needed.
Quality Review: assess team outputs for scientific value, style, and contract fit; set review standards.
Team mentorship & leadership: lead and develop up to 7 scientists; onboard, 1:1s, feedback.
Operations support: collaborate with engineering to optimize compute and platform usage.
Tools and product engineering: build automation tools and provide feedback on platform tools.
Strategy: guide data acquisition and roadmap; assist in hiring and aligning with leadership.

Skills

Leadership

Mentorship

Project management

Stakeholder communication

Strategy development

Scientific judgment

Education

PhD in bioengineering

Job description

Bioengineer, Lead Scientist Role Overview

Overview

Mission: Measure and improve AI model performance in biology by engineering benchmarks and leading a team to deliver for frontier model labs.

As a lead scientist, you will sit at the heart of LatchBio's benchmarking team and report directly to our CTO. You will work closely with the therapeutics and drug development team, product engineering, and scientific leadership to build and scale benchmark and task production.

Responsibilities

Benchmark co-design: Map the "space" of your domain knowledge into a taxonomy of benchmarks, and co-author and release them for frontier labs to monitor and improve model performance. See https://benchmarks.bio/ for examples.
Hands-on task design: Design the tasks and graders that compose benchmarks yourself; set task standards and rubric quality for the team. Essentially, design the standards for what great is.
Production and quality: Once the team is in place, ensure the program meets volume and timelines agreed on with our partners. Volume is set per partnership and depends on its scope. The type of delivery may change by contract, eg. from eval creation to rubrics or preference labeling.
Quality Review: Review the team's work before delivery. Beyond automated platform checks, this means you need strong judgement of scientific value, clear and professional writing, tasks that fit the contract's scope, and decision‐making on whether a task teaches a real, transferable skill. You will also design and decide on quality and review standards for different types of work.
Team mentorship & leadership: Lead a team of up to 7 scientists. Coordinate onboarding, 1:1s, feedback, and professional development. Be a reliable and communicative point of contact when they are blocked, technically or professionally. Advocate for team needs to leadership.
Operations support: Be a force multiplier: Work closely with the engineering team to optimize compute and platform usage so individual scientists can focus on the science.
Tools and product engineering: With the engineering team, build tools that automate tedious parts of task creation, and act as a core user who gives feedback on new platform tools.
Strategy: Lead domain initiatives such as data acquisition and roadmap definition, and help hire and close strong candidates. Communicate strategic initiatives directly with leadership to build consensus and execute across the organization.

First 1-3 months

Your rough milestones. Much of this work runs in parallel, so your timing will vary.

Month 1
Deliverable: Meet the team and onboard to internal tooling. Design the structure of your first benchmark, in line with CTO and MTS-level thinking, and start drafting the first tasks. Support: Scientific and strategy leads (MTS)

Month 2

Deliverable: Design and launch a benchmark. Begin to manage and onboard first L1 hires on the team. Support: COO and recruiting leads

Month 3

Deliverable: With the MTS in place, engage a frontier lab partner to scale up work and start hiring to build out the function. Support: Head of Product and production leads

Workload and hours

This is a normal full‑time role: about 40 hours per week. Nights and weekends are not expected. When crunches have happened (for example a first major contract), we adjusted quotas. The role is hybrid. Daily onsite presence is not required (though welcomed and encouraged), and some L2s are fully remote.

Your role vs. the MTS role

Both roles work on and co‑author gene therapy benchmarks. The difference is ownership: the MTS owns the entire business vertical - hiring, production, deliverables, timelines, and customer relationships - while you own hands‑on management, scientific excellence and judgement, and tooling people rely on.
Benchmark role: You co‑author. The MTS leads or co‑authors.

Customer contact: You support. The MTS owns it, on tight deadlines.
Accountability: You own specific projects and benchmarks. The MTS owns the end‑to‑end business vertical.
Team: You onboard and mentor the team, and refer and help close hires. The MTS is directly responsible to hire, build the team, lead, and provide vision and strategy.
Onsite: You do not need to be onsite daily, and remote is possible. The MTS is heavily onsite.
After‑hours: Not expected for you. For the MTS, late nights are common, for instance when a delivery is on the line.

Path to MTS: there are no fixed promotion criteria, but we share an understanding that promotion to MTS is possible, based on performance aligning with the ability to execute on the responsibilities above consistently over time.

Ramp time and onboarding

Ramp to full speed takes about 3 months. Onboarding happens through the month 1 milestones above: meeting the team and getting set up on internal tooling, then learning by doing on live task generation work with team leadership.

Interview process

1: Introduction (30m) - logistics - Recruiting

2: Take‑home evaluation project (~2 hours) - MTS

3: Technical interview / live engineering session (1 hour) - MTS

4: Who interview (1 hour) - your experience - Founder

5: Culture interview - COO

6: Offer

Comp

OTE $250k-$300k + Equity

Benefits