Staff AI/ML Research Engineer (GenAI)

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education to addressing the needs of our local communities. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.

The Team

CZI supports the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century. While this may seem like an audacious goal, in the last 100 years, biomedical science has made tremendous strides in understanding biological systems, advancing human health, and treating disease. 

We build open source software tools and leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate the pace of biomedicine. We fund scientific research worldwide to advance the frontiers of knowledge. And we launched a family of institutes to do research that can’t be done in conventional environments. Each aspect is essential to our approach to building for the long term.

CZI’s work in science includes grantmaking programs, open-source software development, and close collaboration with its partner institutes at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network. The CZ Biohub Network includes the San Francisco, Chicago, and New York Biohubs as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute. CZI also collaborates with institutional partners like the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural & Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Join us in accelerating science.

The Opportunity

The AI/ML team is funding and building one of the largest computing systems dedicated to nonprofit life science research in the world. This new effort will provide the scientific community with access to predictive models of healthy and diseased cells, which will lead to groundbreaking new discoveries that could help researchers cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.

As an Engineer on the AI/ML team you will apply and optimize state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve important problems in the biomedical sciences aligned with CZI’s mission. You will be expected to be familiar and willing to push the boundaries of generative AI tools for scientific discovery. You will work as part of a team responsible for developing and deploying (Gen-) AI models that use data developed by CZI and research partners all for the purpose of contributing to greater understanding of human cell function and AI for science. You will interface with our AI cluster infrastructure team to build and maintain world class AI modeling capabilities. You will have the opportunity to work closely with teams of scientists, computational biologists, engineers within CZI and to collaborate with CZI grantees, with CZ institutes, and other external labs and organizations. Your work will inspire and enhance the production and analysis of datasets by CZ teams and collaborators. Scientific focus areas could include literature agents, models for single cell biology, imaging, genomics, and proteomics.

What You'll Do

• Work with the Research Scientists, iterate on, optimize, deploy, and maintain large-scale machine learning models, systems, and software tools that enable the analysis and interpretation of complex biology data sets and natural language.
• Work with the team on building, deploying, maintaining AI agents for science
• Work with the cross-functional team members to quickly iterate on system performance and scaling to meet/stay ahead of users’ needs - 
• Build, train, and evaluate multimodal foundation models utilizing CZI’s 1000xH100 GPU compute cluster and distributed training infrastructure. 
• Work with a diverse range of multimodal and biological data types, including multi-omics data, cell/tissue images, human specimen/cohort data, cryoET tomography, scientific literature, and more. 
• May be involved in data pipelining work to clean, manage, and version data to ensure that the Research Scientist has access to reproducible data. 
• Serve as an interface to product teams to understand how models may need to evolve to support multiple use cases.
• Interact with the community through open science practices

What You'll Bring

• Enjoy working in a highly interactive and cross-functional collaborative environment with a diverse team of colleagues and partners in leading-edge cell biology data-driven research.
• Proven track record in developing AI/ML models for large-scale clusters (CPUs and GPUs) and distributing computational load acro