AI Biologist - Medical Countermeasures

The role

You will act as the scientific authority on ground truth to test if AI agents can reason like an expert countermeasures scientist. You will build tasks and datasets for benchmarks covering vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and antivirals for respiratory viruses.

What you will do

• Turn real countermeasure workflows into tasks with clear, gradable answers
• Write gold-standard answers from raw data
• Curate data including neutralization titers, binding and epitope maps, and viral sequences
• Test whether agents can tell real escape or resistance from artifact
• Test whether agents separate binding from neutralization and immunogenicity from protection
• Test whether agents account for immune imprinting, waning, and cross-resistance
• Challenge conclusions that sound right but wouldn't survive a program review
• Pinpoint where agents go wrong and what evidence would change the call
• Reward explicit uncertainty over confident guesses

Required qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in either vaccine/antibody development or antiviral development
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Vaccine antigen design, immunogen engineering, or therapeutic antibody discovery
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Epitope mapping, neutralization, cross-reactivity, and immune recognition
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Comparative evaluation of vaccine or antibody candidates from experimental data
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Antibody responses, immune imprinting, or waning immunity
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Antiviral susceptibility and resistance, including phenotypic drug-response and viral sequence data
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Antiviral discovery, mechanism-of-action studies, or experimental evaluation of candidates
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Treatment-emergent resistance, cross-resistance, and resistance-marker interpretation
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below: Antiviral assay development, validation, and dose-response analysis
• PhD in immunology, virology, microbiology, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience
• You've analyzed the data yourself, not just supervised it
• Daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, or similar

Nice to have

• ideally in respiratory viruses (influenza, RSV, or coronaviruses)

Benefits

• Health, dental, vision: 100% covered for you, 50% for dependents
• 401(k) (no match)
• PTO: 12 days to start, more as you're promoted
• Catered lunch and dinner (onsite)
• Unlimited snacks (onsite)
• Company outings most months
• Team off-sites

Before you apply

• We sponsor H-1B (new and transfers), O-1, and TN, and support STEM OPT
• If your profile matches, we'll send you a take-home project
• Take-home project (HackerRank)
• Technical interview with a Member of Technical Staff (pod lead)
• Culture interview with our C-suite

About the company

Latch builds rigorous scientific benchmarks for AI agents across biology. They work with frontier labs and pharma to measure whether agents can handle real biological workflows.