Member of Technical Staff, Pretraining Science

Job description

# About Us [Radical Numerics](http://radicalnumerics.ai) is an AI research lab building general biological intelligence. Our mission is to master the code of life, and our purpose is to reduce human suffering. Our team created Evo, and started the field of **generative genomics**. Our work was featured on the cover of [Science](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9336), and presented by our CEO on the main stage of [TED2025](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnbfoFUFm2s). Evo was used to create the first AI gene therapy tool CRISPR-Cas9, and the first [AI whole genome](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1) from scratch. [Evo 2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10176-5), featured in Nature, is the largest fully open source AI project across any domain. Radical Numerics is bringing the rigor of distributed systems, model architecture, and numerics research to the challenges of biology. We’ve redesigned the foundation model training stack to turn the world’s raw scientific data (e.g. biological sequences, experiments, and physical processes), into intelligible, generative models that can expand and accelerate what humanity can understand, design, and cure. The same generative breakthroughs that enable life-saving cures also lowers the barrier to creating engineered threats and AI-generated bioweapons. We believe these forces are inseparable. Radical Numerics was founded to develop both the power to design and the responsibility to defend. ## **About the Role** As a Member of Technical Staff, Pre-Training Science at Radical Numerics, you will work on the science of how biological world models learn during large-scale training. You will develop new pretraining methods, study scaling behavior, and design training recipes that improve efficiency, generalization, and downstream scientific usefulness. This role blends research and engineering. You should be excited to move fluidly between theory and implementation: reading technical literature, proposing new hypotheses, running large-scale experiments, and writing high-performance code that turns ideas into measurable progress. We believe that biological foundation models will require advances not only in systems and scale, but also in the science of pretraining itself: how models learn from diverse biological data, what objectives produce useful representations, and how training recipes evolve as models and datasets grow. This role is focused on that core scientific agenda. ## **What You’ll Do** - **Research and develop new pretraining methodologies.** Explore how biological world models learn from multi-modal data (eg, sequence, structure, and image data), and develop new objectives, training strategies, or architectural ideas that improve representation quality and downstream performance. - **Study scaling behavior.** Investigate how training dynamics change with model size, data composition, context length, and compute budget. Use empirical results to inform scaling protocols and future research priorities. - **Design data curricula and sampling strategies.** Build and refine mixtures, curricula, and sampling policies that improve learning efficiency, generalization, and robustness across biological modalities and tasks. - **Work on architecture, algorithms, and optimization.** Evaluate ideas in model design, optimization, long-context learning, and training stability that make large-scale biological pretraining more effective. - **Run large-scale experiments rigorously.** Design, execute, and analyze experiments with strong empirical discipline. Distinguish real effects from bugs, noise, or benchmark artifacts, and convert findings into better training recipes. - **Collaborate closely with infrastructure and data teams.** Work across the stack to ensure large-scale experiments are reproducible, efficient, and instrumented well enough to support fast scientific iteration. - **Define evaluations for pretraining progress.** Build and improve evaluation suites that measure representation quality, long-context behavior, transfer to downstream biological tasks, and scientific utility. ## **What We’re Looking For** - Strong track record in ML research or engineering, especially in large-scale model training, pretraining, representation learning, optimization, scaling laws, or related areas. - Ability to design, run, and analyze experiments thoughtfully, with strong research judgment and empirical rigor. - Proficiency in Python and modern deep learning tooling such as PyTorch, plus comfort debugging distributed or high-performance training systems at scale. - Experience working in distributed or high-performance computing environments. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially the ability to explain complex technical findings clearly across engineering, research, and scientific collaborators. - Intellectual curiosity and a bias toward experimentation, iteration, and continuous improvement. ## **Nice to Have** - Experience training or analyzing frontier or foundation models. - Strong grasp of probability, statistics, optimization, and ML fundamentals. - Familiarity with curriculum learning, data selection, active learning, or data-quality methods for large-scale training. - Experience designing or maintaining evaluation frameworks for large models. - Contributions to open-source ML systems, datasets, or research tooling. - Background in applied math, systems, computational biology, physics, mathematics, or another strongly quantitative field. ## **Why Radical Numerics** - Help build the multimodal biological world models needed for rapid detection, response, and countermeasures across global health. - Work on fundamental questions in pretraining science while staying close to real scientific applications in biology. - Join a collaborative culture that values rigor, creativity, and cross-disciplinary partnership across AI labs, biotechs, hospital systems, and research institutes. - Competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and support for continual learning. *Radical Numerics is committed to equal employment opportunity and does not discriminate in any employment opportunities or practices based on an individual's race, color, creed, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), religion (all aspects of religious beliefs, observance or practice, including religious dress or grooming practices), marital status, registered domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry (including language use restrictions and possession of a driver’s license issued under California Vehicle Code section 12801.9), natural hair, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, medical condition (including cancer or a record or history of cancer, and genetic characteristics), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding or related medical condition), genetic information, sexual orientation, military and veteran status or any other consideration made unlawful by federal, state, or local laws. It also prohibits unlawful discrimination based on the perception that anyone has any of those characteristics, or is associated with a person who has or is perceived as having any of those characteristics.* *Radical Numerics participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.*