Co-Op, AI Nucleic Acid Design

The role

This co-op will lead a research project in nucleic acid sequence modeling or design. You will build ML models on RNA and DNA sequence-function data and collaborate with experimental scientists.

What you will do

• Lead a scoped research project in nucleic acid sequence modeling or design.
• Build ML models on RNA and DNA sequence-function data.
• Prototype new methods for property prediction, generative design or candidate selection.
• Investigate model behavior and propose biological hypotheses.
• Explore how large reasoning models can drive scientific discovery and sequence design.
• Collaborate with experimental scientists to understand assays and propose experiments.
• Present findings to the team.
• Contribute to research write-ups and external publications or presentations.

Required qualifications

• Currently enrolled in an MS or PhD program in machine learning, computational biology, bioengineering, computer science, statistics or a related quantitative field.
• Hands-on experience building and training ML models.
• Strong Python skills.
• Experience with PyTorch, JAX or a similar framework.
• Coursework or research experience with biological sequence data (DNA or RNA).
• Curiosity about nucleic acid biology, such as RNA biology, gene regulation or sequence-to-function relationships.

Nice to have

• Experience with sequence-to-function models, genomic language models, or models trained on MPRA, reporter assay or other functional genomics data.
• Familiarity with RNA secondary structure prediction, UTR or codon design, or inverse design methods.
• Experience with generative modeling, active learning or Bayesian optimization.
• Exposure to wet-lab data or collaboration with experimental scientists.
• A research publication, preprint or open-source project in ML or computational biology.
• Experience using or building with large language or reasoning models, AI agents, or LLM-based tools for scientific tasks.

About the company

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence to solve humankind's greatest challenges. The company combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory instruments to execute the scientific method autonomously.