AI Biologist - Pathogen Countermeasures
About The Position
Latch builds scientific benchmarks for AI agents across biology and works with frontier labs and pharmaceutical companies to assess whether agents can handle real biological workflows. The AI Biologist will join the Pathogen Countermeasures team and help benchmark AI performance in vaccine, therapeutic antibody, and antiviral development against influenza, RSV, and coronaviruses. The role serves as the scientific authority on ground truth, evaluating whether AI agents reason like expert countermeasures scientists. The successful candidate will turn real countermeasure workflows into clear, gradable benchmark tasks; produce gold-standard answers from raw experimental data; curate relevant datasets; and assess whether agents make defensible scientific conclusions and advance-or-kill decisions. The role involves close work with scientists and engineers. The successful candidate will identify errors in agent conclusions, explain what an expert would do instead, determine what evidence would change a judgment, and favor explicit uncertainty over unsupported confidence. The position starts on the benchmark that best fits the candidate’s expertise, with opportunities to move across teams as they build a track record.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of hands-on experience in vaccine or antibody development, or antiviral development; respiratory-virus experience with 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, antiviral assay development, assay validation, or dose-response analysis.
- PhD in immunology, virology, microbiology, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
- Must have personally analyzed the data, rather than only supervised its analysis.
- Daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, or similar AI tools, with the judgment to identify answers that may be technically correct but scientifically wrong.
- Confidence to overrule an AI agent and openness to updating one’s view when shown to be wrong.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on experience with respiratory viruses, especially influenza, RSV, or coronaviruses.
Responsibilities
- Convert real countermeasure workflows into benchmark tasks with clear, gradable answers, including antigen and immunogen comparison, epitope mapping, neutralization and cross-reactivity, antiviral susceptibility, and resistance interpretation.
- Write gold-standard answers from raw data and define tolerances that account for 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.
- Test whether agents distinguish genuine escape or resistance from assay artifacts, passenger mutations, and unsupported fold-change interpretations.
- Evaluate 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.
- Identify conclusions that would not withstand program review, explain where agents went wrong and what an expert would do instead, and specify what evidence could change the assessment.
- Reward explicit uncertainty rather than confident guesses.
Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision coverage fully covered for the employee and 50% covered for dependents (US employees).
- 401(k) with no employer match (US employees).
- 12 days of PTO to start, with more as the employee is promoted.
- Four-week ramp paid at full OTE while training.
- 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 to a special project.
- Monthly company outings, team off-sites, and community activities.
- 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
