Bio AI Research Scientist

Company: Society for Conservation Biology
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: May 21, 2025

Job Description:

Job DescriptionJob DescriptionAbout Prima Mente
Prima Mente's goal is to deeply understand the brain, to protect the brain from neurological disease and enhance the brain in health. We do this by generating our own data, building brain foundation models, and translating discovery to real clinical and research impact.

Role focus
Solve complex biological problems via robust high impact experimental design and critical judgements on project viability. Publish world-class scientific research papers.

• Drive foundational research in ML for biological problems, setting ambitious agendas and leading their execution.
  
• Conceptualize and develop novel foundation models, scaling them across massive, complex biological datasets.
  
• Lead high-impact experiments, effectively navigating signal-to-noise in large-scale biological data.
  
• Collaborate closely with interdisciplinary teams, bridging AI research, computational biology, and experimental scientists.
  
• Publish influential research in leading journals and conferences, establishing thought leadership in BioAI.
  
• Mentor researchers, building a vibrant, collaborative, and scientifically rigorous culture.
  
  
  Expected Growth
  In 1 month you will be responsible for:
  
  • Deeply understanding our existing biological datasets, research infrastructure, and current foundation-model architecture.
    
  • Formulating clear hypotheses and a prioritized roadmap for foundational model research, including immediate experimental directions.
    
  • Establishing close relationships with interdisciplinary teams (ML engineers, computational biologists, experimental scientists), ensuring effective collaboration.
    
    In 3 months you directly own and have created:
    
    • A prototype or early iteration of a novel AI foundation model specifically designed or fine-tuned for biological datasets.
      
    • Initial experimental results demonstrating significant potential for improving predictive accuracy or biological insights, validating your chosen research direction.
      
    • A clear research proposal and experimental framework presented internally.
      
      In 6 months you have:
      
      • Delivered substantial progress on a state-of-the-art genomic foundation model, validated through rigorous benchmarking and demonstrating measurable biological or clinical impact.
        
      • Authored (or prepared for submission) a manuscript targeting top-tier conferences or journals, clearly establishing the team as a thought leader in BioAI.
        
      • Started mentoring junior team members, actively shaping the scientific and cultural growth of your research team.
        
      • Built productive collaborations across internal and external teams, significantly contributing to the company's reputation and scientific credibility in AI-driven genomics.
        
        
        Why Join Us:
        • Meaningful Impact: Contribute directly to research infrastructure that powers discoveries potentially impacting millions of lives.
          
        • Innovation & Autonomy: Work at the forefront of AI and multi-omics, with the freedom to propose and implement state-of-the-art infrastructure solutions.
          
        • Exceptional Team: Collaborate with talented colleagues from diverse backgrounds across ML, bioinformatics, and engineering.
          
        • Growth Opportunities: Continuous learning and growth opportunities in a rapidly advancing technical field.
          
          
          Culture Insight
          What we are doing is extremely hard. Prima Mente is for great people. We are team players who appreciate challenges, want to be hands-on, and thrive on curiosity by throwing away assumptions. We are focused on excellence at pace and huge personal growth. We are strong communicators who are highly disciplined and rigorous.
          
          Prima Mente operates with a flat organizational structure. We gain and share knowledge by contributing to multiple opportunities. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence.
          
          We arrange our lives so we can work in person as much as possible.
          
          Our Values
          • Exceptional performance at exceptional pace
            
            • The solutions we build demand uncompromising quality and rigour.
              
            • The problems we are solving are grave and present.
              
            • Inquisitive discovery
              
              • We embrace curiosity and creativity.
                
              • Every question is a path to a transformational breakthrough.
                
              • Radical candour
                
                • We practice unwavering honesty and transparency in all our challenges and interactions.
                  
                • Purposeful individuality
                  
                  • Every individual in our team is celebrated for their identity, uniqueness, and experiences.
                    
                  • We are invested in each one's bespoke personal development.
                    
                  • Nurturing individuality will supercharge our collective purpose and spirit.
                    
                  • Patient impact at scale
                    
                    • We have a steadfast commitment to improve the health and well-being of patients globally.
                      
                    • Every experiment run, every dataset analysed, and every innovation developed, is a step towards achieving a scalable impact.
                      Who You Are
                      You want to redefine what's possible at the frontier of AI and biology. You're intellectually curious, ambitious, and passionate about applying AI to biology. You thrive in interdisciplinary teams, possess an entrepreneurial spirit, and embrace the uncertainty and excitement of pioneering research.
                      
                      Ideal experience
                      • Experience of building highly collaborative research teams.
                        
                      • High agency with the ability to jump on any task as needed.
                        
                      • Hands on end-to-end development of high impact publications that use ML methodologies to solve biological problems.
                        
                      • Proven track record developing state-of-the-art ML models, ideally including transformers, diffusion models, or multimodal architectures.
                        
                      • Experience applying ML to large multimodal biological datasets (genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, single-cell data).
                        
                      • Exceptional coding skills (Python, PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow) and familiarity with scalable training frameworks.
                        
                      • Experience managing large-scale distributed training across GPUs/TPUs.
                        
                      • Background in generative AI, large language models, mechanistic interpretability, or reinforcement learning.
                        
                        
                        Interview Process
                        You will interact with co-founders Ravi and Hannah, before meeting the technical team across a deep dive on your CV and then a round of technical and presentation challenges.Create a job alert and receive personalized job recommendations straight to your inbox.
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Keywords: Society for Conservation Biology, Berkeley , Bio AI Research Scientist, Other , San Francisco, California