Research Scientist, Life Sciences

Menlo Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Menlo Ventures is looking for a Research Scientist to join the Life Sciences team. This role focuses on enhancing AI capabilities via ML and software engineering in the bioinformatics sphere.

The ideal candidate will have substantial research expertise in biological applications, solid programming skills, and a passion for scientific discovery through AI. The position offers a competitive annual salary range of $300,000—$320,000 and requires a minimum of a Bachelor's degree.

Qualifications

• Experience applying ML and software engineering to biological problems.
• Strong software engineering skills and familiarity with production-level Python.
• Hands-on experience in training or fine-tuning ML models.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship tools for scientific workflows.
• Design evaluation benchmarks for model capabilities.
• Work with external users to enhance product features.

Skills

Machine Learning

Software Engineering

Computational Biology

Bioinformatics

Python

Deep Learning

Education

Ph.D. in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, CS or related field

Tools

Bioinformatics Tooling

Job description

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

We're seeking an exceptional Research Scientist to join our Life Sciences team at Anthropic. Our team is building a world‑class research group focused on making Claude a superhuman life sciences research assistant. This role sits at the intersection of machine learning, software engineering, and biology — you'll directly improve model capabilities on scientific tasks through post‑training, evaluation design, and RL environment development.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship agentic tools and integrations that let Claude execute real life science workflows — bioinformatics pipelines, database queries, analysis notebooks, literature review
• Design and build evaluation benchmarks that measure model capabilities on biology tasks — figure interpretation, bioinformatics, protocol reasoning, literature synthesis
• Work closely with product and design teams to scope, prototype, and ship features for life sciences users
• Partner with external biotech, pharma, and academic users to understand their workflows and turn feedback into product improvements
• Build and maintain the engineering infrastructure behind our biology product surface — tool scaffolding, data pipelines, eval harnesses
• Translate biological domain knowledge into product requirements and evaluation criteria that guide model improvement

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience applying ML and software engineering to biological problems — computational biology, bioinformatics, protein ML, genomics, or similar
• Experience working in drug discovery or development at a biotech or pharma company, or conducted fundamental research in an academic setting — with an understanding of what real scientific workflows look like and where they break down
• Strong software engineering skills: comfortable building production-quality Python, working in large codebases, and owning infrastructure end-to-end
• Hands‑on experience training or fine‑tuning ML models (LLMs, protein language models, or other deep learning architectures)
• A track record of shipping computational tools or pipelines that biologists actually use
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and defining problems in a rapidly evolving research environment
• Able to work independently while collaborating tightly with research, product, and domain‑expert teams
• Results‑oriented with a bias toward rapid iteration and measurable impact
• Passionate about using AI to accelerate scientific discovery while maintaining high ethical standards

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience applying ML and software engineering to biological problems — computational biology, bioinformatics, protein ML, genomics, or similar
• Ph.D. in computational biology, bioinformatics, bioengineering, CS, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent industry experience
• Experience with LLM post‑training: RLHF, RL from verifiable rewards, SFT data curation, or eval‑driven development
• Direct experience with therapeutic discovery pipelines — target identification, lead optimization, ADMET modeling, or clinical data analysis
• Familiarity with bioinformatics tooling and pipelines (sequence analysis, structure prediction, single‑cell, variant calling, etc.)
• Experience building agentic systems or tool‑use environments
• Published research in ML for biology, or open‑source contributions to computational biology tools
• Fluency with biological databases (UniProt, PDB, Ensembl, NCBI) and the ability to reason about their schemas and failure modes

Annual Salary

$300,000—$320,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position.
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas!