Staff / Principal Software Engineer

GenBio.ai, Inc.; Palo Alto, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

GenBio AI, Inc. in Palo Alto is seeking an experienced Staff to Principal-level Software Engineer to build the user-facing platform that enables computational biologists, experimental scientists, and pharmaceutical researchers to interact with a growing Virtual Cell world.

This senior IC will shape architecture and drive end-to-end platform development. You will partner with AI researchers, product teams, and biologists to translate foundational models into reliable, accessible scientific

Qualifications

• Extensive industry experience (typically 8+ years) operating at a Staff or Principal level, with a proven track record of building production web services, scalable APIs, and complex distributed backend systems.
• Exceptional software engineering fundamentals, demonstrating a mastery of clean architecture, modular system design, and the ability to write highly maintainable, performant code.
• Deep, hands-on experience integrating large-scale AI, LLMs, or machine learning inference systems into highly available production environments.
• Proven ability to solve challenging, ambiguous systems problems from the ground up, moving from concept to scalable execution.
• Outstanding cross-functional communication and leadership skills, with the ability to bridge the gap between deeply technical engineering teams, AI researchers, and scientific product teams.

Responsibilities

• Act as a senior technical leader to build the software platform for programmable biology, developing production-grade backend services and APIs for our Virtual Cell products.
• Design clean, robust interfaces that seamlessly connect frontend applications, core business logic, massive biological databases, and state-of-the-art AI inference engines.
• Architect and develop highly scalable systems for complex biological simulations, experiment management, workflow orchestration, and the processing of multimodal biological data.
• Drive continuous improvements in platform performance and reliability through highly efficient architecture design, strategic caching, asynchronous execution, and optimized distributed infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with AI researchers to translate cutting-edge foundation models into reliable, user-facing scientific products that enable virtual perturbations and hypothesis generation.
• Work cross-functionally across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and machine learning teams to deliver deeply intuitive computational experiences for biologists, experimental scientists, and pharmaceutical researchers.

Skills

Staff/Principal level experience

Web services & APIs

Distributed backend systems

AI integration

Cross-functional leadership

Clean architecture

Job description

GenBio AI is building the Virtual Cell World Model - a persistent, multimodal AI system that predicts, simulates, and ultimately programs cellular behavior. Rather than producing isolated predictions, the Virtual Cell enables scientists to query cellular states, perform virtual perturbations, and design new biological interventions within a unified computational world. Together with AIDO Foundry, our AI-native engineering framework for automating Virtual Cell development, we are building the software infrastructure for the next generation of AI-driven drug discovery.

We are seeking an experienced Staff to Principal-level Software Engineer to build the user-facing platform that brings these capabilities to computational biologists, experimental scientists, and pharmaceutical researchers. This is a senior individual contributor role for engineers who enjoy solving challenging systems problems while working closely with AI researchers and product teams.

Responsibilities

• Act as a senior technical leader to build the software platform for programmable biology, developing production-grade backend services and APIs for our Virtual Cell products.
• Design clean, robust interfaces that seamlessly connect frontend applications, core business logic, massive biological databases, and state-of-the-art AI inference engines.
• Architect and develop highly scalable systems for complex biological simulations, experiment management, workflow orchestration, and the processing of multimodal biological data.
• Drive continuous improvements in platform performance and reliability through highly efficient architecture design, strategic caching, asynchronous execution, and optimized distributed infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with AI researchers to translate cutting-edge foundation models into reliable, user-facing scientific products that enable virtual perturbations and hypothesis generation.
• Work cross-functionally across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and machine learning teams to deliver deeply intuitive computational experiences for biologists, experimental scientists, and pharmaceutical researchers.

Qualifications

• Extensive industry experience (typically 8+ years) operating at a Staff or Principal level, with a proven track record of building production web services, scalable APIs, and complex distributed backend systems.
• Exceptional software engineering fundamentals, demonstrating a mastery of clean architecture, modular system design, and the ability to write highly maintainable, performant code.
• Deep, hands-on experience integrating large-scale AI, LLMs, or machine learning inference systems into highly available production environments.
• Proven ability to solve challenging, ambiguous systems problems from the ground up, moving from concept to scalable execution.
• Outstanding cross-functional communication and leadership skills, with the ability to bridge the gap between deeply technical engineering teams, AI researchers, and scientific product teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Domain knowledge or prior experience working with computational biology, genomics, transcriptomics, protein/molecular structures, healthcare, or scientific software.
• Familiarity with building tools for scientific simulation, automated laboratory experiment management, or complex workflow orchestration.
• Experience building unified computational frameworks (similar to our AIDO Foundry) that accelerate the development and deployment of AI-native platforms.

$250,000 - $350,000 a year

Join us as we embark on this journey to redefine the future of biology and medicine.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. GenBio AI participates in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. For more information on E-Verify, please visit www.e-verify.gov.