AI Biologist - Medical Countermeasures

Latch builds rigorous scientific benchmarks (benchmarks.bio) for AI agents across biology. We work with frontier labs and pharma to measure whether agents can handle real biological workflows: the messy, multi-layer reasoning that matters in the field.

We’re seeking an AI Biologist to join our Medical Countermeasures team, pushing what AI can achieve in vaccine, antibody, and antiviral development against respiratory viruses.

About the Role. You will be the scientific authority on ground truth, testing whether agents can reason like an expert countermeasures scientist. The benchmark covers vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and antivirals for influenza, RSV, and coronaviruses. AI agents today struggle to interpret raw neutralization, epitope, and drug-response data, to separate real escape or resistance from assay noise, and to make the advance-or-kill calls an expert would stand behind. You’ll work with scientists and engineers to build the tasks and datasets behind our benchmarks, and your judgment will set the standard agent outputs are held to.

Build the task

Turn real countermeasure workflows into tasks with clear, gradable answers: antigen and immunogen comparison, epitope mapping, neutralization and cross-reactivity, antiviral susceptibility, and resistance interpretation

Write gold-standard answers from raw data, with tolerances that reflect real assay, replicate, and strain variability

Curate data: neutralization titers, binding and epitope maps, serology time courses, EC50 and dose-response curves, and viral sequences with resistance markers

Set the hard calls

Test whether agents can tell real escape or resistance from artifact: a titer drop that’s really assay drift, a passenger mutation mistaken for a resistance marker, or a single fold-change not backed by sequence data

Test whether agents separate binding from neutralization, immunogenicity from protection, and lab resistance from clinical relevance

Test whether agents account for immune imprinting, waning, and cross-resistance when ranking candidates

Judge the agent

Challenge conclusions that sound right but wouldn’t survive a program review

Pinpoint where agents go wrong, what an expert would do instead, and what evidence would change the call

Reward explicit uncertainty over confident guesses

Requirements

3+ years of hands-on experience in either vaccine/antibody development or antiviral development, ideally in respiratory viruses (influenza, RSV, or coronaviruses)

Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below, in priority order within each track: Vaccines and antibodies

Vaccine antigen design, immunogen engineering, or therapeutic antibody discovery

Epitope mapping, neutralization, cross-reactivity, and immune recognition

Comparative evaluation of vaccine or antibody candidates from experimental data

Antibody responses, immune imprinting, or waning immunity

Antivirals

Antiviral susceptibility and resistance, including phenotypic drug-response and viral sequence data

Antiviral discovery, mechanism-of-action studies, or experimental evaluation of candidates

Treatment-emergent resistance, cross-resistance, and resistance-marker interpretation

Antiviral assay development, validation, and dose-response analysis

PhD in immunology, virology, microbiology, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience

You’ve analyzed the data yourself, not just supervised it

AI-ready: daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, or similar, with the judgment to spot answers that are technically correct but scientifically wrong

Confidence to overrule an AI agent, and openness to update when shown wrong

Culture @ Latch

We practice radical transparency: you’ll know how the company is doing, what’s working, and what isn’t. It’s always us against the problem, never each other. We’re opinionated but respectful of each other’s time, and we think through possible solutions before bringing a problem to anyone. We use AI constantly, so we reward original expert judgment, not AI output passed off as your own. You’ll start on the bench that fits your expertise and can move across teams as you build a track record.