Engineering Lead, AI Figure Agent

BioRender; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

BioRender is building an AI figure agent to create scientific figures across pathways, protocols, and posters. You will lead the core agent platform, shaping architecture and orchestration to ship reliable, high-quality AI-powered figures for millions of researchers.

You will guide a small engineering team, drive evaluations of LLMs/VLMs, and collaborate with Product and Creative teams to translate feedback into tangible improvements.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineers and setting technical direction for complex, production-grade AI systems.
• Experience architecting and shipping an agent or multi-agent orchestration platform to production.
• Hands-on with frontier models and VLMs, including model routing and cost/quality trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Lead a small engineering team responsible for the core agent platform, including architecture and orchestration.
• Continuously improve figure quality through evaluations, experimentation, and real user feedback.
• Evaluate and benchmark frontier LLMs and VLMs for scientific accuracy, reasoning, and visual understanding.
• Optimize model selection and routing to balance quality, cost, speed, and reliability.
• Build shared AI infrastructure and tooling to debug agent behavior and ship improvements faster.
• Define quality standards and establish monitoring, alerting, and triage for agent performance.
• Partner with Product and Creative teams to translate feedback into measurable improvements.

Skills

Leadership

Agent orchestration

AI systems architecture

Model routing

Communication across teams

Experimentation & evaluation

People management

Education

Science background (nice to have)

Tools

AgentCore

Job description

At BioRender, we’re on a mission to accelerate the world’s ability to learn, discover, and communicate science – transforming how knowledge is shared and making science open, collaborative, and easily understandable by all.

We’re shaping the future of science communication and are looking for talented individuals to help bring this vision to life!

We're building BioRender's AI figure agent, which can create any scientific figure, from pathways and protocols to graphical abstracts and posters. As the agent becomes central to how 4M+ scientists use BioRender, you'll be responsible for making sure it's fast, dependable, and getting better every week.

What you'll be doing

• Lead a small engineering team responsible for the core agent platform, including architecture, multi-agent orchestration, planning, tool use, and self-correction.
• Continuously improve figure quality through evaluations, experimentation, and real user feedback.
• Evaluate and benchmark frontier LLMs and VLMs for scientific accuracy, reasoning, and visual understanding, integrating new capabilities as models evolve.
• Optimize model selection and routing to balance quality, cost, speed, and reliability.
• Build shared AI infrastructure and internal tooling that help teams debug agent behavior, spot failure patterns, and ship improvements faster.
• Define quality standards and establish monitoring, alerting, and triage for agent performance.
• Partner with Product and Creative teams to translate qualitative feedback into measurable improvements.

What you bring

• Experience leading other engineers and setting technical direction for complex, production-grade AI systems, whether as a senior IC or Engineering Manager.
• Experience architecting and shipping an agent or multi-agent orchestration platform to production.
• Hands-on experience with multiple frontier models and VLMs, including model routing and trade-offs between quality, cost, and speed.
• Strong technical judgment on when to train or fine-tune models, and when not to.
• An evaluation-first approach to improving AI systems, with a strong focus on output quality and understanding failure modes.
• Ability to move quickly, adapt to emerging AI capabilities, and communicate effectively across technical and non-technical teams.
• People management experience is a strong plus.
• Experience with AgentCore or other runtime engines is a plus.
• A science background is a plus, but not required.

Why join us?

• We are mission-driven: we work collaboratively towards our shared vision of improving scientific communication and accelerating scientific discovery. BioRender figures have appeared in more than 54,000 publications!
• BioRender is loved by millions! We have a world-class NPS and a community of loyal fans and users in 200+ countries!
• Our company is backed by top investors and accelerators like Y Combinator, and we are on a growth trajectory comparable to many top-performing SaaS companies
• We’re remote-first with team members across Canada and the U.S., offering you the flexibility to work from anywhere.

BioRender is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status. By submitting this application, you consent to the processing of your personal data by BioRender in accordance with GDPR and our Privacy Policy.