Senior/Staff AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)

The role

This researcher will develop and publish new reinforcement learning methods and generative AI models. The work involves building a post-training engine that closes the loop between frontier AI models and high-throughput biology.

What you will do

• Work with the technical founder and team to develop and execute the scientific vision
• Develop cutting-edge modeling approaches and iterate on new ideas
• Design, implement, and improve model post-training methods
• Translate high-throughput biological measurements into direct reward signals for biological language models
• Architect model training infrastructure
• Build, run, and debug models, training loops, and evaluation metrics
• Partner with the experimental team to ensure lab measurements and model learning are a cohesive system

Required qualifications

• PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field, with a minimum of 1-2 years of post-PhD research or industry experience
• Accomplished researchers without a PhD are also encouraged to apply
• Experience training models from scratch
• Experience owning real training runs and debugging them
• Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and/or transformer architectures
• 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

Benefits

• Potential to evolve into a co-founding technical 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.