AI Biologist - Pathogen Countermeasures
About The Position
Latch builds scientific benchmarks for AI agents working across biology and collaborates with frontier labs and pharmaceutical companies to evaluate agents on real biological workflows. The AI Biologist will join the Pathogen Countermeasures team, focusing on vaccine, therapeutic antibody, and antiviral development for influenza, RSV, and coronaviruses. The role serves as the scientific authority for benchmark ground truth, assessing whether AI agents can reason like expert countermeasures scientists. You will work with scientists and engineers to turn real-world workflows and experimental data into benchmark tasks, datasets, and gold-standard answers. Your scientific judgment will define the standards against which agent outputs are evaluated. The work includes building gradable tasks, curating experimental and sequence data, evaluating difficult scientific decisions, and identifying where agent conclusions fail to meet expert standards. The role can begin on the team best suited to your expertise, with the possibility of moving across teams as you build a track record.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of hands-on experience in vaccine or antibody development, or antiviral development; experience with respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, or coronaviruses is ideal.
- Deep expertise in at least one relevant area: vaccine antigen design, immunogen engineering, therapeutic antibody discovery, epitope mapping, neutralization, cross-reactivity, immune recognition, comparative evaluation of vaccine or antibody candidates, antibody responses, immune imprinting, waning immunity, antiviral susceptibility and resistance, antiviral discovery, mechanism-of-action studies, candidate evaluation, treatment-emergent resistance, cross-resistance, resistance-marker interpretation, or antiviral assay development, validation, and dose-response analysis.
- PhD in immunology, virology, microbiology, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
- Have personally analyzed the data, rather than only supervised the work.
- Daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, or a similar AI tool, with the judgment to identify answers that are technically correct but scientifically wrong.
- Confidence to overrule an AI agent and openness to update when shown to be wrong.
Nice To Haves
- Experience in respiratory viruses, including influenza, RSV, or coronaviruses.
Responsibilities
- Turn real countermeasure workflows into clear, gradable tasks covering antigen and immunogen comparison, epitope mapping, neutralization and cross-reactivity, antiviral susceptibility, and resistance interpretation.
- Write gold-standard answers from raw data, with tolerances that reflect assay, replicate, and strain variability.
- Curate neutralization titers, binding and epitope maps, serology time courses, EC50 and dose-response curves, and viral sequences with resistance markers.
- Evaluate whether agents distinguish genuine escape or resistance from assay artifacts, passenger mutations, and unsupported fold changes.
- Assess whether agents distinguish binding from neutralization, immunogenicity from protection, and laboratory resistance from clinical relevance.
- Test whether agents account for immune imprinting, waning immunity, and cross-resistance when ranking candidates.
- Challenge agent conclusions that would not withstand a program review.
- Identify where agents go wrong, explain what an expert would do instead, and specify what evidence would change the conclusion.
- Reward explicit uncertainty rather than confident guesses.
Benefits
- Health insurance, with 100% coverage for the employee and 50% coverage for dependents in the US.
- Dental insurance, with 100% coverage for the employee and 50% coverage for dependents in the US.
- Vision insurance, with 100% coverage for the employee and 50% coverage for dependents in the US.
- 401(k) plan with no employer match.
- 12 days of PTO to start, with more as employees are promoted.
- Paid first four weeks at full OTE during training and ramp.
- Full OTE pay when quota cannot fairly apply, such as when a new project is starting, the platform is down, or the employee is assigned a special project.
- Potential for promotions and increasing OTE through individual-contributor or management career tracks.
- Company outings most months and team off-sites.
- Catered lunch and dinner and unlimited snacks at the San Francisco office.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
