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:

Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 system card

Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 system card

Anthropic: Advancing Claude in healthcare and life sciences

xAI: Grok 4.7 model card

xAI: Biosecurity at the frontier

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