Lead Foundation Models Engineer, AI-Driven Drug Discovery

Genentech

South San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 193,000 - 358,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Genentech, part of Roche, seeks a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to advance AI for Drug Discovery. You will own the MLOps/AgentOps stack for foundation models and build autonomous agents that reason across complex drug discovery workflows.

You will lead the design of scalable ML systems, productionize pipelines, and collaborate with ML scientists and domain experts to translate ambitious scientific goals into robust, enterprise-grade software.

Qualifications

PhD with 5+ years, MS with 8+ years, or BS with 10+ years of industry experience building, shipping, and owning large‑scale ML systems and infrastructure end‑to‑end.
Exceptional Python programming skills and rigorous software engineering fundamentals (Git, automated testing, CI/CD, documentation).
Deep Learning and Distributed Systems experience with PyTorch/JAX and deploying ML infrastructure on AWS or HPC environments.
Experience designing agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, MCP-based tool integration), memory management, and self‑improving loops.
Strong domain interest in AI for Drug Discovery (AI4DD), biology, and chemistry.

Responsibilities

Own the MLOps/AgentOps Stack for Foundation Models and establish evaluation harnesses and observability.
Design and deploy autonomous agents that utilize tools, retrieve evidence, and perform multi-step reasoning across workflows.
Design scalable ML systems and productionize pipelines; own production Python/PyTorch codebases.
Define long-term engineering roadmap for AI4DD’s agentic and foundation models and lead cross‑functional platforms.
Translate open-ended problems into scoped, efficient, and deployable systems with ML scientists and domain experts.