Virology MTS: Biosecurity & AI Safety Lead

LatchBio; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free meals (lunch and dinner)

Waterfront office near Oracle Park

Job summary

LatchBio is seeking a Member of Technical Staff - Virology in San Francisco to lead safety benchmarking efforts within the Biosecurity group. You will design evaluations to assess how AI systems could be misused, and work with researchers to measure guardrails and guidance quality in wet-lab contexts.

You will collaborate with biologists and engineers to interpret viral data, plan experimental workflows, and ensure responsible deployment of frontier AI in biology.

Qualifications

• PhD in virology or closely related field.
• Substantial hands-on wet-lab virology experience including experimental design and troubleshooting.
• Experience in BSL-3 or high-containment BSL-2 labs.
• Experience using or evaluating LLMs, foundation models, or AI-enabled biological design tools.
• Proficiency in Python and/or R.

Responsibilities

• Design the technical approach to assess how agents could be misused for biological harm.
• Build evaluations to measure safety guardrails in AI systems for biology.
• Collaborate with research engineers and biologists to assess viability of virology experiments.
• Interpret viral genomes, proteins, mutations, and phenotypic data.
• Plan iterative experimental workflows and evaluate feasibility across conditions.

Skills

Python

R

Education

PhD in virology or related field

Tools

Bioinformatics tools

Job description

LatchBio is seeking a Member of Technical Staff - Virology in San Francisco to lead safety benchmarking efforts within the Biosecurity group. You will design evaluations to assess how AI systems could be misused, and work with researchers to measure guardrails and guidance quality in wet-lab contexts.

You will collaborate with biologists and engineers to interpret viral data, plan experimental workflows, and ensure responsible deployment of frontier AI in biology.