Jobs Companies Chai Discovery Software Engineer, Product & Applied AI

About this Software Engineer, Product & Applied AI role at Chai Discovery

Chai Discovery · Onsite · San Francisco office

About Chai Discovery

Chai is a research lab working on AI to unlock biology. Our models design new molecules for new medicines. We are changing how biologists develop drugs, just as language models are changing how engineers write code. Our vision is a design suite for molecules, with applications across life sciences, agriculture, materials and beyond.

Our founders have been at the forefront of this field from the beginning. We are backed by Thrive, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Dimension and other tier-one investors. We partner with global life sciences companies like Eli Lilly on deals that are transforming industry.

We are known for talent density, rigorous research and pace of execution.

About the role

Product and applied AI engineers ship Chai's design suite for medicines, building Chai's foundation models directly into it.

A great foundation model needs the right product around it to be useful, and our product is the harness that enables the world's best drug designers. You'll own the web interfaces and APIs that pharma's best scientists live in and the applied AI layer that turns raw model capability into something a biologist can actually use.

Our models have moved beyond structure prediction into real therapeutic engineering, and the product has only just begun to catch up to what they can do. Problems include rendering large molecular structures interactively without dropping frames, designing interfaces that help scientists reason alongside the models, and turning messy scientific workflows into something fast and repeatable.

You'll work in a tight loop with researchers, scientists, our partner-facing team, and customers, alongside a craft-obsessed team of micro-pessimists and macro-optimists.

About you

We index on taste, speed, and ownership. We're looking for engineers who get obsessed with hard problems, ship small and often, and are as comfortable wiring up a model as they are polishing a UI. We look for:

  • 3+ years building production web apps with modern frameworks (React or Vue, TypeScript, and a Node/Go/Python backend)

  • A bias for the smallest amount of code that solves the user's problem well, and real care about pixel-level craft

  • Fluency with automated testing, CI/CD, and monitoring for 24/7 services

  • The instinct to instrument, read data, and iterate on it

  • The ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-engineers and translate scientific requirements into engineering work

A background in biology is not required. What makes the difference is technical excellence, curiosity about the domain, and grit. Prior exposure to scientific data, bio-visualization, or HPC workloads is a bonus.

We offer

The opportunity to work at the leading edge of AI research, with world-class people, on a mission that matters. We protect & promote a culture of high velocity and ownership. We offer highly competitive compensation.

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