Member of the Technical Staff - AI/ML Engineer

Breakout Ventures; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Full benefits

Job summary

Transfyr seeks an AI/ML Engineer to build end-to-end ML systems that learn from messy laboratory data. You will collaborate with perception engineers to ground data into actionable interpretations and integrate models into real workflows, shaping automation in science.

You will work on models that handle partial observability, noise, and changing protocols, while communicating uncertainty and justification to scientists and operators.

Qualifications

• Strong programming experience in software engineering, data systems, and AI/ML product development.
• Solid grounding in machine learning with real-world data learning capabilities.
• Experience reasoning about multimodal data (vision, audio, sensor data) and how signals interact.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end ML systems that learn from messy, real-world data captured in active lab environments.
• Collaborate with perception engineers to design multimodal pipelines and grounded interpretations of actions and outcomes.
• Develop models that reason about why experiments succeed or fail when multiple factors are intertwined.
• Create systems that indicate model confidence to guide human intervention when needed.
• Integrate models into real workflows where outputs influence human decisions and robotic actions.
• Ensure models generalize across experiments, teams, and geographies, not just lab-specific artifacts.

Skills

Great programmer

ML Fundamentals

Multimodal Learning

Python & Frameworks

Data & Pipelines

Production Awareness

Systems Mindset

Learning Velocity

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Job description

Member of the Technical Staff - AI/ML Engineer

About Transfyr

Transfyr is building physical AI for science.

Why is it that a professional athlete has dramatically more information about every play they make than a scientist has about the cause of any experimental failure? Science has no film room, no instant replay. Instead, a protocol says what was meant to happen. A publication is a lossy record of what might have worked. But all the small decisions and invisible actions that determine whether an experiment succeeds, fails, or transfers to the next lab often disappear the moment the work is done or a scientist leaves.

That missing record is why it has been so hard to automate the physical work of science. It’s why training still remains dependent on scarce, one-to-one apprenticeship. It’s why tech transfer typically requires expensive troubleshooting and is one of the biggest causes of drug launch delays. It’s why scientists struggle to distinguish between biological noise and process variability.

We’re changing that. Transfyr builds physical AI systems that capture real scientific work and turn it into a high-fidelity, machine-readable record of execution and analysis of where process variability is impacting results. In doing so, we are also building the world’s largest commercial dataset on real-world scientific execution. The result is infrastructure that helps teams learn from failures, transfer hard-won know-how, train the next generation of scientists, and give models and robots the grounded data they need to be useful in the real world.

We’re tackling some of the hardest problems at the intersection of frontier science, perception, machine learning, and robotics and have significant traction. We’re backed by a $25M seed round, are collaborating with the largest frontier AI labs, and our advisors include Chris Ré (Stanford), David Baker (Nobel winning UW professor), Kevin Weil (fmr CPO at OpenAI), Steve Quake (Stanford biophysicist), Ken Frazier (fmr CEO of Merck), and Jakob Uszkoreit (CEO of Inceptive and author of "Attention Is All You Need").

We’re unapologetically ambitious and pragmatic. If you want to work on the hardest problems in the most important industry on earth, join us.

Want to learn more? Read our launch letter here.

The Role

AI/ML engineers at Transfyr build the learning systems that turn raw observations of scientific work into usable insight, feedback, and automation.

You will build end-to-end ML systems that learn from messy, real-world data captured in active laboratory environments. You’ll work closely with our computer vision team to integrate grounded data (e.g. object coordinates, action timings, etc.) to develop grounded interpretations of actions and their scientific impact. Your models must contend with partial observability, significant noise, long context requirements, changing protocols, and ambiguous outcomes and still produce signals that scientists and downstream systems can trust.

The role demands strong ML fundamentals, solid software engineering judgment, and high agency. You will work closely with perception engineers, software engineers, and scientists to ensure models are grounded in reality and tightly integrated into real workflows. We’re tackling frontier-hard AI problems and applying those models to frontier science.

We're building a team, and we have needs across levels, from hands-on builders early in their careers to senior engineers who enjoy shaping learning architectures and technical direction.

This role is in-person in Cambridge, MA (other locations may open in the future, feel free to reach out even if Boston is not currently an option for you).

A tip:

While we welcome direct applications, we prefer warm introductions. If you’re really interested in Transfyr, we strongly recommend you get an introduction from someone who knows you well and whose opinion we’re likely to trust. And in general, the strongest way to get our attention is to show us what you have built, solved, or learned that is relevant to this role.

What you’ll accomplish with us:

• Learn from Messy Reality: Build ML systems that learn from real-world scientific execution data where feedback is delayed, labels are incomplete, and outcomes are confounded by how work was actually done.

• Fuse the World: Collaborate with perception engineers to design multimodal learning pipelines that combine vision, audio, sensor data, metadata, and outcomes into coherent representations of scientific workflows.

• Provide Explainability: Develop models that can reason about why an experiment succeeded or failed when intent, execution, environment, and outcome are tightly entangled.

• Know When the Model Is Unsure: Build systems that surface model confidence / uncertainty, enabling scientists to understand when to trust a recommendation and when to intervene.

• Close the Loop: Integrate models into real workflows where outputs influence both human decisions and robotic actions, and model behavior must remain robust as protocols, operators, and environments change.

• Generalize, Don’t Memorize: Ensure models learn transferable structure rather than lab- or site-specific artifacts, enabling insights to carry across experiments, teams, and geographies.

• Lay the Groundwork for Automation: Enable future physical AI systems by ensuring models learn from execution-level data, not just outcomes, building foundations for automation that can work in the real world.

Who you are

• High agency. You don’t wait for perfect datasets or well-posed problems. You identify what needs to be learned, build the right scaffolding, and push work forward.

• Biased toward action. You prototype quickly, test assumptions against real data, and iterate based on failure rather than waiting for theoretical certainty.

• Successful in ambiguity. You can make progress when labels are incomplete, feedback is delayed, and success criteria evolve over time.

• Thoughtful. You understand when sophistication helps and when it obscures, and you make deliberate tradeoffs between model complexity, robustness, and operational cost.

• Clear, direct communicator. You can explain model performance and limitations to collaborators across engineering, science, and operations.

• Intense. You care deeply about the mission, work hard when it matters, and help keep the team oriented toward what actually moves the needle.

What you know:

• Great programmer: Strong programming expertise with experience in software engineering, data systems, and AI/ML product development.

• ML Fundamentals: Strong grounding in machine learning, with experience building models that learn from noisy, real-world data rather than clean, static datasets.

• Multimodal Learning: Experience working with or reasoning about multimodal systems (e.g., vision, audio, sensor data, metadata, text), and an intuition for how different signals complement or confound each other.

• Python & Frameworks: Fluency in Python and modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch), with experience training, evaluating, and iterating on models in real systems.

• Data & Pipelines: Experience designing data pipelines and training/evaluation infrastructure that evolve over time as new data arrives and assumptions change.

• Production Awareness: Understanding of what it takes to move from prototype to production, including monitoring, iteration, and maintaining models as environments drift.

• Systems Mindset: Ability to work across the stack in close collaboration with software and perception engineers, understanding that model performance depends on the surrounding system.

• Learning Velocity: Strong fundamentals, curiosity, and the ability to quickly learn new tools, models, or domains as the problem demands.

Other things we like to see:

• A passion for and experience in science

• Entrepreneurial spirit - hackathons, successful projects, startups

• Demonstrated experience working in fast-moving/ambiguous environments (like startups!)

The basics:

• Competitive compensation (cash + equity)

• Full benefits (low/no-cost health insurance options, HSA, 401K with matching, lunch subsidy, etc.)