Principal AI Scientist, Autonomous Discovery

The role

You will invent and build next generation evolutionary algorithms. You will develop methods to enable populations of models, hypotheses, programs, or scientific representations to evolve through iterative search, selection, variation, and evaluation.

What you will do

• Design and implement algorithms for autonomously generating and evolving populations of candidate solutions at scale.
• Develop principled methods for maintaining population diversity.
• Build Bayesian and probabilistic frameworks for evaluating, comparing, and ranking candidates.
• Define and validate quantitative metrics of diversity and quality across a population of candidates.
• Partner with research and engineering teams to integrate algorithms into closed-loop autonomous science pipelines.
• Establish benchmarks and ablations that demonstrate when and why evolved populations outperform baselines.
• Contribute to the broader scientific direction through internal readouts, reusable methods, datasets, prototypes, and external publications.

Required qualifications

• PhD in a quantitative field (statistics, computer science, applied mathematics, computational biology, physics, or related) with a strong research track record, or equivalent demonstrated expertise wi
• Deep expertise in advanced Bayesian causal modeling and/or evolutionary programming.
• Demonstrated ability to design novel algorithms from first principles and bring them to working, validated implementations.
• Strong software engineering skills.
• Comfort running computational experiments at scale.
• A record of scientific leadership recognized by the field.
• Ability to operate as a senior IC: setting technical direction, collaborating across research and engineering, and mentoring junior colleagues.

Nice to have

• Experience applying these methods to biological, scientific, or other mechanistic-modeling domains

Benefits

• healthcare coverage
• annual incentive program
• retirement benefits
• a broad range of other benefits

About the company

Flagship Pioneering invents and builds platform companies to transform human health, sustainability and beyond. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated more than 100 companies.