AI in Residence, Computational Protein Design

The role

You will develop and advance machine learning models for protein and antibody design, and own projects from problem framing through deployment. The work supports real therapeutic discovery programs at Xaira.

What you will do

• Develop and advance ML models for protein and antibody design using biophysical, affinity, library display, structure and sequence data
• Design and implement scalable pipelines for data curation, training, evaluation and inference within discovery workflows
• Own projects end-to-end: problem framing, prototyping, validation and deployment
• Evaluate robustness and reliability, including generalization, uncertainty and failure modes, plus interpretability where it supports scientific decisions
• Provide technical leadership by proposing new directions, shaping platform capabilities and raising engineering and research standards
• Work closely with AI scientists, research engineers and drug discovery teams

Required qualifications

• Recent MS or PhD graduate, or equivalent research experience, in ML/AI, computational biology, biomedical engineering or a related field
• Evidence of research excellence through high-quality publications or artifacts such as strong preprints, open-source contributions or shipped systems with demonstrated impact
• Demonstrated ability to lead substantial technical work with originality: new modeling ideas, rigorous experiments or production-grade systems adopted by others
• Technical depth, intellectual independence and strong research judgment
• Motivation to translate rigorous research into reliable, deployable AI systems that support therapeutic discovery
• Include a brief cover letter describing your interest in the role, why you are excited about this area and what you hope to gain

Nice to have

• Publications at top venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, Nature Methods or Cell Systems

Benefits

• Dedicated technical mentor
• Structured feedback from senior AI, engineering and scientific leadership
• Possible support for publications and conference presentations, subject to internal review
• Small, highly selective cohort with meaningful ownership and close collaboration

Before you apply

• Cover letter is requested with the application
• Publication scope and timing are subject to internal review, including IP and confidentiality
• Rolling applications, with a small highly selective cohort

About the company

Xaira Therapeutics is a biotech startup using AI to transform drug discovery, developing generative models for protein and antibody therapeutics and foundation models for biology and disease. It is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and London.