About this role
Lead Scientist Role Overview
Our mission is to advance humanity's ability to engineer biology. We approach this by understanding and improving AI’s application to biology across basic research, drug discovery, and biosecurity. We are a team of engineers, scientists, and operations specialists who are driven by improving capabilities and interpretability. Some of our work is showcased on benchmarks.bio.
As a lead scientist, you will sit at the heart of LatchBio's benchmarking team and report directly to a member of technical staff. You will work closely with the therapeutics and drug development team, product engineering, and scientific leadership to build and scale benchmark and task production.
How we work. Our platform team works in person in Mission Bay, San Francisco, and our science team is hybrid in person/remote. We keep meetings to a minimum and are flexible about when you work. Tight deadlines and customer commitments sometimes require late hours.
Our work in use. Frontier AI labs use our benchmarks to assess biological capabilities and safeguards. Our work appears in research announcements and model cards, including:
Responsibilities
Benchmark co-design: Develop taxonomies and publish frontier model evaluations.
Task design: Define benchmark tasks, graders, rubrics, and standards.
Production: Meet partner delivery volumes, timelines, and requirements.
Quality review: Ensure scientific rigor, clarity, relevance, and transferability.
Team leadership: Manage ~seven scientists, mentorship, feedback, and escalations.
Operations: Optimize compute, platforms, and scientist productivity with engineering.
Product: Automate workflows and guide platform development.
Strategy: Lead roadmaps, data acquisition, hiring, and organizational alignment.
Hiring Process.
Our process is typically completed within two weeks.
Round 1: Introduction
Round 2: Take-home evaluation project (~2 hours)
Round 3: Technical interview / live engineering session (1 hour)
Round 4: Career review (1 hour)
Round 5: Culture & leadership interview (45 mins)
Offer
Compensation & Benefits
OTE: 220-300k+
Equity
Unlimited PTO
Health, dental and vision insurance fully covered
Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance
401(k)
Office in Mission Bay, San Francisco
Lunch and dinner provided
About LatchBio
AI infrastructure for biosecurity