Founding Engineer

10x Science (YC W26); Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

401(k) plan

Personal development support

Job summary

A biotech startup is seeking founding engineers to join a pioneering team in Menlo Park, California. This role involves building core modules of an AI-native scientific computing platform used by top pharmaceutical companies. Engineers will work closely with the founders, tackling complex problems that directly affect drug development. Candidates should have strong skills in systems programming and a drive to excel in a fast-paced environment. Competitive salary and equity included, with unique opportunities for growth.

Qualifications

• Strong fundamentals in systems programming, algorithms, and data structures.
• Experience with performance-oriented software development.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous situations.

Responsibilities

• Build and own core modules of a scientific computing platform.
• Architect systems for throughput and scale.
• Deploy solutions to enterprise customers and iterate based on feedback.

Skills

Low-level systems architecture

Compute-performance tradeoffs

Interpretability

Adaptability to new tools

Intellectual curiosity

Job description

About 10x Science

10x Science (YC W26) develops frontier AI models with deep memory to redefine how scientists understand and engineer biology across the life sciences, starting with drug development.

Before a drug candidate can advance to the clinic, scientists must deeply characterize the protein therapeutic to understand whether it will work. Today, that process takes months of manual, error‑prone analysis. Our AI‑native platform automates it, giving drug developers the confidence to advance the right candidates and stop the wrong ones early.

We are a team of three scientist‑founders from Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley who built foundational technology in next‑generation protein characterization. We are already working with multiple top‑10 pharma companies and have enterprise contracts in motion. We are well‑capitalized and focused on building.

The Team

David is a Stanford postdoctoral scholar and Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow who has spent 15+ years on the science this platform automates, with foundational publications across the Nature family of journals, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and other leading scientific publications. Andrew trained at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he built the analytical tools pharma uses to understand how drugs bind their targets, before joining the Bertozzi lab at Stanford. Vishnu is a 2x YC founder who was the founding engineer at Nooks and helped scale them through their Series B. Together, we built the field of next‑generation protein characterization out of Carolyn Bertozzi’s Nobel laureate lab at Stanford. No one had turned it into software until now.

The Role

10x Science is hiring two founding engineers to join a three‑person founding team and build the core platform from the ground up. You will pair‑program directly with the founders on bare‑metal, high‑throughput, AI‑native software that is already being deployed to top‑10 pharmaceutical companies.

This will be the highest‑leverage work of your career. The systems you build will process data that no existing software can handle at the speed and accuracy our customers require. You will write fundamental algorithms, architect performance‑critical infrastructure, and ship code that reaches production on a weekly cadence. The problems are genuinely hard, genuinely novel, and have a direct line to patients receiving better medicines faster. You will be reporting directly to the CTO, Vishnu.

Why Join

You will be founding engineer #1 or #2 at a company that is already selling to the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. That is rare at this stage. The code you write will directly determine whether a drug candidate advances or gets stopped: decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to our customers and, downstream, the patients waiting for those medicines.

The founding team has 15+ years of domain expertise in the science our software automates. You will not be guessing at requirements or building to a spec handed down from a PM. You will pair‑program with the founders on hard, novel problems at the intersection of high‑performance computing, scientific algorithms, and AI. No scientific background is required. We will teach you everything you need to know about the domain. What we cannot teach is the drive to move with urgency and the desire to build something that matters.

Our Culture

We are a small team that moves with extraordinary momentum. We are building something that has never existed before, and we are doing it on a timeline that most people would consider unreasonable. That is by design. We believe the best work happens when exceptional people commit fully to a mission that matters, when they operate with total ownership, and when the pace itself becomes a source of energy rather than fatigue.

We are looking for people who share that drive. People who are frustrated by bureaucracy and convention. People who want to shape the next era of scientific advancement and are ready to match the commitment of a founding team that moves at the highest velocity. If you want to work at the frontier of what is possible, with teammates who hold each other to the highest standard, this is the role for you.

We are also deeply committed to your personal and professional growth. Whether you want a long‑term career as a founding member of 10x Science or plan to start your own company someday, we will invest in your development and support either path.

What You Will Do

• Build and own core modules of a high-performance scientific computing platform from first principles


• Architect systems for throughput, correctness, and scale across large and complex datasets


• Work directly with the founding team to translate deep scientific domain knowledge into production software


• Deploy to enterprise pharmaceutical customers and iterate based on real‑world feedback


• Make foundational technical decisions that will define the platform for years to come

First 90 Days

You will ship production code in your first week. Within your first month, you will own a core module of the platform and make architectural decisions with real consequences. We do not have an onboarding program. You will learn by building, pair‑programming with the founders, and deploying to customers who are counting on what you build. The pace is fast and the stakes are real from day one.

You Will Succeed If You Have These Skills

• Low-level systems architecture. You know how to architect low-level systems in Rust. It could be writing novel kernels because you were fed up with PyTorch, or even a library for processing a web app’s data. If you are comfortable with another systems language like C, C++, or Go, you do not need to learn Rust syntax before meeting with us. You should be comfortable applying your practical implementation skills across languages.


• Intuition for compute‑performance tradeoffs. You have a sense for when to apply zero‑parameter, zero‑time leverage (XSA, Partial RoPE, Late QAT, etc.) versus forcing the silicon to reveal its absolute limits by benchmarking compilers and GPUs.


• Obsessed with interpretability. You care deeply about understanding why a system behaves the way it does, not just that it works.


• Leverage the best available tools. You adopt AI coding agents, CLI tooling, and anything else that multiplies your output. You are not attached to doing things the old way when a better way exists. The speed at which you incorporate new tools into your workflow is a competitive advantage.


• Learn like a sponge. You absorb new domains quickly and without ego. You are comfortable being wrong, asking questions, and updating your understanding in real time.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong fundamentals in systems programming, algorithms, and data structures


• Experience building software that has to be fast: you have a track record of caring about performance at a low level


• Comfort operating in ambiguity: you can take an ill‑defined problem, break it down, and ship a working solution


• Drive and momentum: you are looking for a founding role because you want to move faster than any corporate environment allows


• Intellectual curiosity about hard technical problems, even in domains outside your current expertise

Nice to Have

• Experience with high-performance or scientific computing


• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure or numerical methods


• Prior experience at a high-growth startup or as an early engineer

Compensation

Salary range is $150,000 to $240,000 depending on qualifications and experience. For truly exceptional candidates at the senior or staff level, we are willing to exceed the posted range.

Selected candidates can expect to receive 0.5% to 2% equity. Vesting schedule is a 12‑month cliff and 4‑year monthly vesting.

We also offer a 401(k) plan and the opportunity to shape the full benefits package as a founding team member.

Make Your Case

We know that the best candidate for this role might not have a traditional background. If your experience doesn't map neatly to the sections above but you believe you belong here, tell us why. We are far more interested in how you think, what you've built, and what drives you than in whether your resume checks every box. Send us a note, a project, a piece of code, or anything that shows us what you're capable of. We, the founders, took unconventional paths to get here, and some of the best engineers we have met did too.

Research shows that people from underrepresented groups often apply to jobs only when they meet 100% of the listed qualifications. If you believe you have the skills to thrive in this role, we encourage you to apply. You do not need to check every box.

This is a full‑time W‑2 position based in San Francisco Bay Area. We are unable to sponsor visas other than O‑1 at this time.

10x Science, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.