Member of Technical Staff, AI Engineering for Biosecurity

Radical Numerics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive benefits

Support for continual learning

Job summary

Radical Numerics is an AI research lab building general biological intelligence. We design and deploy multimodal genome language models to advance biosecurity and biodefense, while addressing real-world risks.

You’ll collaborate with computational biologists, AI scientists, and systems engineers to translate advances into deployable capabilities and security-focused solutions. We seek research scientists and engineers with a deep learning background applied to biological problems, strong Python

Qualifications

• Experience applying ML to biological problems.
• Strong Python and ML tooling experience.
• Familiarity with molecular biology and genomic data modalities.
• Ability to reason about real-world risks of AI in biology.

Responsibilities

• Build and fine-tune frontier AI models.
• Design experiments applying large models to biosecurity problems.
• Bridge to real-world biosecurity systems and deployable tools.
• Analyze model behavior and ablations.
• Explore mechanistic interpretability for sequence data.
• Prototype new approaches using foundation models.
• Operate with high ownership in a fast-moving environment.

Skills

Deep learning

Evaluation benchmarks

Python

ML tooling

Biological data ML

Risk assessment

High agency

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Experiment management

Distributed training

Job description

About Us

Radical Numerics is an AI research lab building general biological intelligence. Our mission is to master the code of life, and our purpose is to reduce human suffering.

Our team created Evo, and started the field of generative genomics. Our work was featured on the cover of Science, and presented by our CEO on the main stage of TED2025. Evo was used to create the first AI-generated CRISPR-Cas9, and the first AI whole genome from scratch. Evo 2, featured in Nature, is the largest fully open source AI project across any domain.

In October, we introduced Omnii-1, the world's most advanced multimodal genome language model, and a leap toward general biological intelligence. It unifies 28 biological modalities, spanning DNA, RNA, proteins, epigenomics, and more, in a single model trained on trillions of tokens of biological data In a world first, Omnii-1 designed the first AI-generated bacteriophages to be administered to a human patient with an antibiotic-resistant infection under compassionate use. We released this news alongside seven other project areas, showing the model’s breadth of applications.

The same generative breakthroughs that enable life-saving cures also lowers the barrier to creating engineered threats and AI-generated bioweapons. We believe these forces are inseparable. Radical Numerics was founded to develop both the power to design and the responsibility to defend.

About the Role

We are seeking research scientists and engineers in machine learning and artificial intelligence, with experience applying AI to biological problems or an interest in doing so. You will help lead the design, evaluation, and deployment of our multimodal genome language models, with a particular focus on our biosecurity and biodefense efforts.

In this role, you will collaborate with our multidisciplinary team (e.g., computational biologists, AI scientists, and systems architecture engineers) to translate advances in large-scale machine learning into capabilities for modeling biological systems. You will extend and adapt large model backbones—such as sequence and multimodal foundation models—to enable tasks across genomics, protein biology, and cellular systems. This includes designing post-training pipelines, domain adaptation strategies, and evaluation frameworks that enable state-of-the-art ML frameworks to reason over biological data.

What You’ll Do

• Build and adapt frontier AI models through fine-tuning and post-training.
• Design and run experiments applying large models to problems relevant to biosecurity and biodefense.
• Bridge to real-world biosecurity systems. Translate technical capabilities into deployable systems such as early warning platforms, sequence screening tools, attribution technologies, and rapid detection and response pipelines. Work with government and partners to align systems with real-world workflows.
• Analyze model behavior and run ablations to understand model reasoning and failure modes in biological contexts.
• Explore modern mechanistic interpretability pipelines and methods for sequence characterization and model understanding.
• Prototype new approaches for prediction and design using foundation models.
• Operate with high ownership in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong technical background in deep learning for large-scale classification, retrieval, or generative models.
• Ability to design evaluation tasks and benchmarks that measure model capability beyond simple accuracy metrics, with a critical eye toward aligning computational outputs with actionable downstream applications.
• Strong Python and ML tooling experience (PyTorch or JAX, experiment management, distributed training)
• Experience applying ML models to biological data and challenging prediction tasks.
• Familiarity with molecular biology and biological data modalities, particularly genomics, gene regulation, protein biology, or cellular systems, or an interest in applying your AI/ML skills in this space.
• Ability to reason concretely about what biological AI systems can and cannot do, how those capabilities translate into real-world risks, and how to measure and mitigate those risks.
• High agency: defines problems, runs with them, and ships.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with multimodal biological modeling, including in genomics or protein structure.
• Experience building robust evaluation suites for large AI systems.
• Experience scaling ML experiments across large GPU clusters.
• Research publications in ML for biology, chemistry, or related areas.
• Experience in applied areas of biosecurity or biodefense, such as pathogen-agnostic detection or countermeasure development.
• Familiarity with bioinformatics algorithms and tooling like BLAST, DIAMOND, HMMER, etc.
• Experience with models like biological foundation models like Evo, ESM, AlphaFold.

Why Radical Numerics

• We believe biology is the most impactful and consequential application of AI.
• Join peers that are mission driven, and dedicated to creating radically innovative tech that will change the world and human health for the better.
• Work on frontier AI systems in a collaborative culture that values rigor, creativity, and cross-disciplinary partnership across AI labs, biotechs, hospital systems, and national research institutes.
• Competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and support for continual learning.

Radical Numerics is committed to equal employment opportunity and does not discriminate in any employment opportunities or practices based on an individual's race, color, creed, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), religion (all aspects of religious beliefs, observance or practice, including religious dress or grooming practices), marital status, registered domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry (including language use restrictions and possession of a driver’s license issued under California Vehicle Code section 12801.9), natural hair, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, medical condition (including cancer or a record or history of cancer, and genetic characteristics), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding or related medical condition), genetic information, sexual orientation, military and veteran status or any other consideration made unlawful by federal, state, or local laws. It also prohibits unlawful discrimination based on the perception that anyone has any of those characteristics, or is associated with a person who has or is perceived as having any of those characteristics.

Radical Numerics participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.