AI Research Engineer
US$205,000 – US$305,000 / yr base salary
Posted 24 Oct 2025
Advertised as “Senior/ Staff AI Research Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
| Base salary | US$205,000 – US$305,000 / yr |
|---|
Field of studyComputer Science, Engineering (or related)
Study levelBachelor's
Study levelMaster's or higher
About Xaira Therapeutics
Xaira is an innovative biotech startup focused on leveraging AI to transform drug discovery and development. The company is leading the development of generative AI models to design protein and antibody therapeutics, enabling the creation of medicines against historically hard-to-drug molecular targets. It is also developing foundation models for biology and disease to enable better target elucidation and patient stratification. Collectively, these technologies aim to continually enable the identification of novel therapies and to improve success in drug development. Xaira is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and London.
About the RoleWe are seeking an experienced research engineer to join our team. As a critical member of our interdisciplinary group, you will collaborate closely with AI scientists, engineers, and drug discovery experts to develop and deploy AI models that accelerate the identification and development of novel therapeutics. This role offers the opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI techniques in production settings to address pressing challenges in healthcare and contribute to improving human health globally.
We are particularly interested in candidates who have demonstrated experience building and delivering machine learning systems in industry environments, where rigor, scalability, and cross-functional collaboration are essential. The ideal candidate has experience translating research ideas into robust, production-ready solutions that drive measurable impact.
The role is open to the following locations: **San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle
**
What You Will Do
- GPUs go brrr. Identify bottlenecks, streamline network chatter, write kernels, and make the hardware fly.
- Experiment and Scale. Help unlock bigger models, longer training horizons, larger datasets, and weirder training dynamics.
- Implement the architecture. New architecture elements mix biological intuition with thinking in tensors. Translate molecules to matrices, and do it in a way that’s maintainable and clean to read.
- Make some drugs. Drug design campaigns involve heavy inference workloads and the inference harness is where molecule designer needs meet ML implementation skill. Build the tools that we use to make drugs.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields; advanced degree preferred
- Minimum of five years of industry experience in AI, machine learning, or related roles, with a track record of implementing, scaling, and deploying AI models in production environments.