AI in Residence

AI in Residence is a highly selective role at the intersection of frontier machine learning and drug discovery. Designed as an industry alternative to a traditional postdoctoral position, the program is for exceptional researchers and engineers who want to apply advanced AI to real biomedical problems end to end, from data to deployed systems.

Residents join a small cohort working on high-impact AI efforts across Xaira. You’ll collaborate closely with AI scientists, research engineers, and drug discovery teams to design, build, and ship machine learning capabilities that directly influence therapeutic programs. This is hands-on, system-level work with real scientific consequence.

We’re looking for candidates with technical depth, intellectual independence, strong research judgment, and evidence of delivering high-quality work—whether through publications, open-source, or production systems.

What You’ll Do

• Develop and advance ML models for biological, preclinical, and translational datasets (e.g., multimodal omics, imaging, text, assay data)
• Design and implement scalable pipelines for data curation, training, evaluation, and inference integrated into discovery workflows
• Own projects end-to-end: problem framing → prototyping → validation → deployment
• Evaluate robustness and reliability (generalization, uncertainty, failure modes), plus interpretability where it supports scientific decision-making
• Contribute technical leadership by proposing new directions, shaping platform capabilities, and raising engineering/research standards through collaboration
  
  

You Might Work On

Examples include (not limited to):

• Foundation / representation models over multimodal biological and translational data
• Methods for small, biased, noisy datasets; distribution shift; and uncertainty estimation
• ML systems for experimental prioritization, assay interpretation, or translational signal discovery
• Evaluation frameworks and benchmarks tailored to discovery decision-making
• Tooling that makes models usable by scientists (interfaces, automation, monitoring)
  
  

What Success Looks Like

• You ship one or more models or pipelines that are used in real discovery workflows
• Your work improves decision quality (e.g., better prioritization, faster iteration, clearer uncertainty)
• You raise the bar on evaluation rigor and reproducibility (strong baselines, error analysis, reliable metrics)
• You leave behind maintainable systems (tests, documentation, monitoring) that others can build on
  
  

We Value

• Strong research judgment: choosing the right problems and knowing what “good evidence” looks like
• Rigor: careful experimental design, ablations, error analysis, and honest reporting
• Systems thinking: reliability, scalability, and maintainability—not just prototypes
  Clear communication: writing, documentation, and sharing decisions/assumptions
• Collaborative execution with scientific and engineering partners
  
  

Program Structure

Duration
6–12 months, with the possibility of extension or conversion to full-time

Start Dates
First hires beginning March 2026, with rolling applications and additional intakes in Summer and Fall 2026

Cohort Size
Small, highly selective cohort to enable meaningful ownership and close collaboration

Mentorship & Support
Dedicated technical mentor, plus structured feedback from senior AI, engineering, and scientific leadership

Publications & Presentations
We value scientific contribution and may support publications and conference presentations when appropriate. Publication scope and timing depend on project needs and are subject to internal review (e.g., IP and confidentiality). Authorship follows standard contribution-based guidelines.

Who Should Apply

We encourage applications from candidates who meet most of the following:

• Recent MS or PhD graduates (or equivalent research experience) in ML/AI, computational biology, biomedical engineering, or related fields
• Evidence of research excellence through high-quality publications or artifacts. Top venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL; Nature Methods, Cell Systems) are a plus, but strong preprints, open-source contributions, or shipped systems with demonstrated impact are equally compelling
• Demonstrated ability to lead substantial technical work with originality—new modeling ideas, rigorous experiments, or production-grade systems adopted by others
• Motivation to translate rigorous research into reliable, deployable AI systems that support therapeutic discovery
  
  

Please include a brief cover letter describing your interest in this role, why you’re excited about this area, and what you hope to gain from the experience.

Compensation:

The expected monthly compensation range is $10,000–$15,000, depending on experience and qualifications. We are open to higher compensation for candidates with exceptional experience or impact.

About the Role
We are seeking a Biomedical AI Engineer to design and deploy agentic AI systems that can reason over biomedical knowledge, plan multi-step analyses, and autonomously integrate diverse scientific data sources to accelerate therapeutic discovery.

This role goes beyond traditional LLM + RAG pipelines. You will build AI agents that can retrieve, synthesize, evaluate, and act on biomedical information across literature, omics datasets, and clinical records operating as intelligent systems embedded within discovery workflows.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement agentic AI architectures capable of multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use in biomedical contexts.
• Develop LLM-based agents that dynamically retrieve, rank, and synthesize knowledge from scientific literature, knowledge graphs, omics datasets, and clinical data.
• Build memory and feedback mechanisms that allow agents to refine hypotheses, update context, and adapt to evolving data.
• Integrate external tools (analysis pipelines, simulation engines, statistical models, databases) into autonomous agent workflows.
• Architect scalable systems that combine structured and unstructured biomedical data within production-grade AI environments.
• Collaborate closely with computational biologists, translational scientists, and software engineers to embed agentic systems into real-world discovery pipelines.
• Evaluate robustness, reliability, and interpretability of autonomous systems in high-stakes biomedical settings.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Biology, Biomedical Informatics, or related field.
• Strong hands-on experience with large language models, including fine-tuning, alignment, and structured prompting.
• Experience building agent-based systems or complex LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., multi-agent systems, tool-using LLMs, planning modules).
• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).
• Experience working with large-scale biomedical datasets (genomics, transcriptomics, clinical records, or scientific corpora).

Preferred

• Experience designing autonomous research assistants or AI systems that perform multi-step scientific reasoning.
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs, hybrid symbolic-neural systems, or multimodal foundation models.
• Understanding of privacy, security, and regulatory considerations in healthcare AI.

Compensation

We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, seeking to provide an open, flexible, and friendly work environment to empower employees and provide them with a platform to develop their long-term careers. A Summary of Benefits is available for all applicants. We offer a competitive package that includes base salary, bonus, and equity. The base pay range for this position is expected to be $190,000 - $280,000 annually; however, the base pay offered may vary depending on the market, job-related knowledge, skills and capabilities, and experience.

Xaira Therapeutics an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that our strength is in our differences. Our goal to build a diverse and inclusive team began on day one, and it will never end.

TO ALL RECRUITMENT AGENCIES: Xaira Therapeutics does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or employees. Xaira Therapeutics is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

• Develop multimodal foundation models spanning image and molecular data
• Design approaches that unify representation learning and generative modeling
• Train large-scale models on structured, high-dimensional datasets
• Explore cross-modal alignment, prediction, and generation
• Build scalable systems for data processing, training, and evaluation
• Work in a research-driven environment with evolving problem definitions

• Experience with representation learning (self-supervised, contrastive, masked modeling, etc.)
• Experience with generative modeling (diffusion, autoregressive models, VAEs, or related approaches)
• Proficiency in Python, ML frameworks, and CI/CD (PyTorch, JAX, etc.)

• Work on multimodal learning or cross-domain representation learning
• Experience with image data, molecular / omics-like data, or both
• Familiarity with large-scale training

• Exposure to biological or scientific datasets
• Experience with paired or partially aligned multimodal data
• Comfortable working in open-ended, evolving problem spaces

Compensation

We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, seeking to provide an open, flexible, and friendly work environment to empower employees and provide them with a platform to develop their long-term careers. A Summary of Benefits is available for all applicants. We offer a competitive package that includes base salary, bonus, and equity. The base pay range for this position is expected to be $170,000 - $240,000 annually; however, the base pay offered may vary depending on the market, job-related knowledge, skills and capabilities, and experience.

Xaira Therapeutics an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that our strength is in our differences. Our goal to build a diverse and inclusive team began on day one, and it will never end.

TO ALL RECRUITMENT AGENCIES: Xaira Therapeutics does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or employees. Xaira Therapeutics is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

About the Role
We are looking for an AI Scientist to join our team at the intersection of machine learning and single-cell biology. This role will focus on developing and applying foundation models to large-scale perturb-seq and single-cell datasets to uncover new biological mechanisms and therapeutic opportunities. You will help design scalable ML architectures that can extract insight from high-dimensional perturbation data and integrate across multi-omic modalities.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, train, and refine foundation models tailored to perturb-seq and other single-cell datasets.
  Build pipelines for preprocessing, normalization, and integration of large-scale single-cell and perturbation data.
• Apply ML/AI approaches to model cellular responses to perturbations and identify causal biological insights.
• Collaborate with experimental biologists to align computational methods with experimental design and discovery goals.
• Develop multimodal integration approaches across transcriptomic, epigenomic, and proteomic single-cell readouts.
• Publish methods and results in top scientific journals and present at conferences.
  
  

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent in Computational Biology, Computer Science, Bioinformatics, or related discipline.
• Strong expertise in single-cell data analysis, particularly perturb-seq 
• Hands-on experience with foundation models or large-scale self-supervised learning (e.g., transformers, variational autoencoders).
• Strong coding skills in Python, ML frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow), and single-cell analysis tools (Scanpy, Seurat).
• Experience in developing scalable ML methods for large biological datasets.
  
  

Preferred

• Background in causal inference, generative models, or representation learning for biological systems.
• Familiarity with multi-omics integration and cross-modal foundation models.
• Track record of impactful publications in computational biology, machine learning, or related fields.

Compensation

We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, seeking to provide an open, flexible, and friendly work environment to empower employees and provide them with a platform to develop their long-term careers. A Summary of Benefits is available for all applicants. We offer a competitive package that includes base salary, bonus, and equity. The base pay range for this position is expected to be $150,000 - $240,000 annually; however, the base pay offered may vary depending on the market, job-related knowledge, skills and capabilities, and experience.

Xaira Therapeutics an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that our strength is in our differences. Our goal to build a diverse and inclusive team began on day one, and it will never end.

TO ALL RECRUITMENT AGENCIES: Xaira Therapeutics does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or employees. Xaira Therapeutics is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.