Founding Research Engineer - Biology Foundation Models

CT19; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

CT19 is partnering with an early-stage startup at the intersection of BioTech and AI, building a core intelligence layer for biology. We are seeking a Founding Research Engineer to help build and scale the systems that power the company’s models.

This role sits at the intersection of research and engineering, focusing on training, post-training, evaluation, performance optimisation, and the infrastructure required to support these processes.

Qualifications

• Experience training or significantly improving advanced LLMs or generative ML systems.
• Strong software engineering and distributed systems expertise.
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience with reinforcement learning or post-training methodologies.
• Background building evaluation systems for tool-using or open-ended models.
• Understanding of GPU memory constraints and performance trade-offs.
• Experience diagnosing performance issues in production ML environments.
• Comfortable balancing research exploration with engineering execution.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve training and post-training systems for biological foundation models and agent-based workflows.
• Design and run experiments across supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, tool use, evaluation, and model behaviour optimization.
• Develop and maintain distributed RL and post-training infrastructure.
• Improve reliability of rollout, evaluation, and reward pipelines.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across GPU, networking, and storage layers.
• Collaborate with founders and domain experts to translate biological problems into model tasks and evaluation frameworks.
• Contribute to translating research advancements into tangible product and customer impact.

Skills

LLM training

Distributed systems

Python

PyTorch/JAX

Reinforcement learning

Evaluation systems

GPU performance

Production ML

Research-to-implementation

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

CT19 is partnering with an early-stage startup at the intersection of BioTech and AI, building a core intelligence layer for biology. We are seeking a Founding Research Engineer to help build and scale the systems that power the company’s models.

This role sits at the intersection of research and engineering, focusing on training, post-training, evaluation, performance optimisation, and the infrastructure required to support these processes.