Senior AI Scientist — Generative Bio & RL Research (Remote)

Astera Institute; Emeryville (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement plan

Vision

Dental

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Astera Institute is seeking a Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join the Polytope Bio residency project. You will influence modeling approaches, experimental design, and training strategy with substantial compute and data-generation capabilities.

Based in the US with potential NYC/SF co-location and remote options, the role offers a base salary of $200,000 to $300,000 plus a comprehensive benefits package and potential co-founder trajectory.

Qualifications

• PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field.
• Trained models from scratch, not only fine-tuned or APIs.
• Experience with modern diffusion or transformer architectures.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods.
• Proven track record of research impact via publications or open-source work.

Responsibilities

• Drive core research with the founder to shape the scientific vision and modeling approaches.
• Develop post-training RL feedback loops translating measurements into rewards for models.
• Hands-on engineering to architect training infra and run experiments.
• Bridge wet/dry lab work with the experimental team to align measurements and models.

Skills

Model training

Diffusion models

Transformer models

Reinforcement learning

Publications/Open-source

Entrepreneurial mindset

Education

PhD in machine learning or computational biology

Job description

Astera Institute is seeking a Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join the Polytope Bio residency project. You will influence modeling approaches, experimental design, and training strategy with substantial compute and data-generation capabilities.

Based in the US with potential NYC/SF co-location and remote options, the role offers a base salary of $200,000 to $300,000 plus a comprehensive benefits package and potential co-founder trajectory.