Principal AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)

The role

The Principal AI Scientist will develop and publish new reinforcement learning methods and bio AI models. This role involves shaping scientific direction, modeling approaches, and training strategies for a post-training engine that closes the loop between AI models and high-throughput biology.

What you will do

• Co-direct the research program by partnering with the founder to shape scientific vision and technical execution.
• Design, implement, and improve model post-training methods to translate biological measurements into reward signals.
• Architect model training infrastructure and build, run, and debug models, training loops, and evaluation metrics.
• Partner with the experimental team to bridge wet and dry labs.

Required qualifications

• PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field with a minimum of 2 to 5 years of industry research experience post-PhD (accomplished researchers without a PhD are also encouraged t
• Experience training models from scratch.
• Experience owning real training runs and debugging them.
• Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures.
• Deep familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods for deep learning.
• Track record of strong research via publications, open-source work, shipped models, or equivalent evidence.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with biological research (protein modeling, sequence models, structural biology, or adjacent areas).
• Experience building and scaling training infrastructure on large GPU clusters.
• Past team management and technical leadership experience.

Benefits

• Potential for a co-founding leadership role in a future spinout
• Authorship of high-impact open-source datasets, methods, and models
• Significant secured runway and dedicated GPU resources
• Full benefits package including health insurance, a company sponsored retirement plan, vision, dental, and more

About the company

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. It has committed a $3.5B endowment to grants, investments, and in-house research programs.