Senior AI Research Scientist — Frontier Genomics & RL

Astera Institute; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); Remote; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement plan

Vision & Dental

Job summary

Astera Institute seeks a Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join our foundational team. You will work hands-on to develop and publish reinforcement learning methods and generative AI models aligned with high-throughput biology measurements, shaping the next generation of AI-assisted biotech research.

Based in the United States with preference for NYC or SF Bay Area, remote work is possible for the right candidate.

Qualifications

• PhD in ML or computational biology with 1–2 years post-PhD research or industry experience.
• Trained models from scratch; owned full training runs and debugging processes.
• Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures.
• Familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization for deep learning.
• Strong research track record via publications, open-source work, or shipped models.
• Entrepreneurial spirit and ability to thrive in a tight-knit, early-stage environment.

Responsibilities

• Drive core research: collaborate with technical founder to develop and execute scientific vision and rapidly iterate ideas.
• Develop RL feedback loop: design and implement post-training methods translating biology measurements into reward signals.
• Hands-on engineering: architect training infra and run models, training loops, and evaluation metrics.
• Bridge wet/dry lab: align lab measurements with model learning as a cohesive system.

Skills

Model training from scratch

Diffusion models

Transformer architectures

Reinforcement learning

Research publications/open-source

Builder mindset

Education

PhD in machine learning or computational biology

Tools

Large GPU clusters

Job description

Astera Institute seeks a Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join our foundational team. You will work hands-on to develop and publish reinforcement learning methods and generative AI models aligned with high-throughput biology measurements, shaping the next generation of AI-assisted biotech research.

Based in the United States with preference for NYC or SF Bay Area, remote work is possible for the right candidate.