Senior/Staff AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)
Astera Institute2 months ago
San Francisco, CA, USA or New York, NY, USASenior / Staff+
H1B sponsor
Base Salary
$200k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Drive core research by developing and executing the scientific vision.
- Design and implement reinforcement learning feedback loops for biological language models.
- Work hands-on with the technical team to build and debug model training infrastructure.
- Collaborate with the experimental team to ensure cohesive system design between lab measurements and model learning.
Requirements
- PhD in machine learning, computational biology, or a related field with 1-2 years of post-PhD experience.
- Experience training models from scratch and debugging training runs.
- Hands-on experience with generative diffusion models and transformer architectures.
- Familiarity with modern reinforcement learning and preference-optimization methods.
- A strong research track record demonstrated through publications or open-source work.
- An entrepreneurial spirit and comfort with ambiguity.
Benefits
- Base salary of $200,000 to $300,000 during the residency.
- Potential to evolve into a co-founding technical role in a future spinout.
- Authorship of high-impact open-source datasets, methods, and models.
- Access to significant secured runway and dedicated GPU resources.
- A unique environment combining frontier ML work with high-throughput experimental capabilities.
- Comprehensive benefits package including health insurance and retirement plan.
Categories
Data Science
About Astera Institute
Astera Institute is a Berkeley-based nonprofit research organization that incubates high-leverage scientific initiatives and founders in overlooked areas. It funds and builds early-stage programs, providing capital, labs, and operational support, with work spanning tools, hardware, and software. Founded in 2020, its portfolio includes Astera Neuro, which develops instruments and infrastructure for large-scale neural recording and control.