Principal Scientist, Evolutionary AI & Autonomous Discovery

Pioneering Intelligence; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 208,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Annual incentive program

Retirement benefits

Broad range of other benefits

Job summary

Pioneering Intelligence is seeking a Senior Principal Scientist to invent and build the next generation of evolutionary algorithms for autonomous science.

In this senior IC role, you will develop methods that enable populations of models to evolve over time through iterative search, selection, variation, and evaluation, drawing on Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, optimization, and automated discovery.

Qualifications

• PhD in a quantitative field with a strong research track record or equivalent post-PhD experience.
• Deep expertise in Bayesian causal modeling or evolutionary programming with proven implementations.
• Ability to design novel algorithms from first principles and bring them to working code.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience running large-scale computational experiments.
• A record of scientific leadership through first-author work or open-source impact.
• Experience applying these methods to biological or scientific domains is highly desirable.
• Ability to operate as a senior individual contributor, setting direction and mentoring peers.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement algorithms for autonomously generating and evolving populations at scale.
• Develop principled methods to maintain population diversity and avoid cosmetic variants.
• Build Bayesian frameworks for evaluating and ranking candidates with uncertainty.
• Define and validate quantitative metrics of diversity and quality across populations.
• Partner with research and engineering teams to integrate algorithms into autonomous pipelines.
• Establish benchmarks and ablations to show evolved populations outperform baselines.
• Contribute to the broader scientific direction with reusable methods, datasets, prototypes, and publications.

Skills

Bayesian causal modeling

Evolutionary programming

First-principles algorithm design

Software engineering at scale

Scientific leadership

Mentoring junior colleagues

Education

PhD in statistics / CS / math / biology / physics

5+ years post-PhD experience

Tools

Probabilistic programming

Genetic/evolutionary algorithms

Quality-diversity methods

Population-based search

Job description

Pioneering Intelligence is seeking a Senior Principal Scientist to invent and build the next generation of evolutionary algorithms for autonomous science.

In this senior IC role, you will develop methods that enable populations of models to evolve over time through iterative search, selection, variation, and evaluation, drawing on Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, optimization, and automated discovery.