ML Researcher

We offer opportunities to do your life’s work while helping solve one of the most important technical and moral challenges of our time. Full-time, in-office in Emeryville, California. Compensation includes equity. Develop the learning methods that turn repeated assays into better scientific decisions. The central question is prospective: can a model use prior compound, assay, and behavior data to recommend an experiment that is more informative than the one scientists would otherwise run? Key Responsibilities • Research models that combine molecular information, formulation and dose, assay metadata, video-derived behavior, and laboratory context • Develop active-learning and sequential experiment-selection methods that balance predicted efficacy, uncertainty, novelty, and information value • Define retrospective and prospective evaluations, including holdouts by chemical scaffold, laboratory, colony, and time • Investigate which behavioral signals generalize across experiments and which reflect confounding, measurement noise, or laboratory-specific effects • Translate model failures into new labels, assay variants, controls, or experiments that improve the next training cycle • Communicate results with enough precision that experimental scientists can understand why a recommendation should or should not be trusted Qualifications • Ph.D. or equivalent research record in machine learning, statistics, computational science, or a closely related field • Demonstrated ability to formulate open-ended research questions, build strong baselines, and design evaluations that survive distribution shift • Strong software skills in Python and a modern machine-learning framework • Experience working with noisy, limited, multimodal, or experimentally generated datasets • Ability to move between theory, implementation, and scientific interpretation Desired Attributes • Experience with active learning, Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning, causal inference, or scientific foundation models • Experience in molecular discovery, biology, animal behavior, robotics, or another domain where models learn from physical experiments • Track record of prospective validation rather than benchmark-only research • Strong research taste and comfort abandoning an attractive idea when the evidence does not support it