ML Research Scientist - Computational Biologist/Bioinformatics

Merge Labs • San Francisco, CA

8h

About The Position

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab working to bridge biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency, and experience. The company is developing new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are intended to be safe and accessible.

The Bio team develops and characterizes biotechnologies for next-generation brain-computer interfaces, combining molecular engineering, synthetic biology, neuroscience, and physical methods such as ultrasound. The team develops molecular technologies, validates them in vitro and in vivo, and demonstrates capabilities in animal models, working across disciplines with engineers and data scientists.

Merge Labs is hiring a Senior / Principal Computational Biologist focused on bioinformatics and omics. This role leads the design and deployment of large-scale omics pipelines, integration of multimodal biological data, and collaboration with machine learning teams to uncover mechanistic and predictive insights. The scientist will architect frameworks that turn raw omics data into analysis-ready datasets and build ML-integrated pipelines. The work may lead to predictive frameworks that accelerate molecular engineering, inform experiments, and support discovery of highly functional molecules.

Requirements

• Deep experience with omics data analysis, including bulk and single-cell data, and bioinformatics pipelines.
• Expertise in Python and/or R.
• Fluency with workflow management tools such as Nextflow or Dagster.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and/or JAX, and comfort writing clean, reproducible, production-grade code.
• Experience bridging computational biology and experimental science, including working with sparse, noisy, and/or high-cost data.
• A collaborative, systems-level mindset.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with neuroscience.
• Familiarity with transfer-learning paradigms.

Responsibilities

• Build the scientific and engineering scaffolding for bioinformatics and computational biology.
• Design, optimize, and maintain pipelines for genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data.
• Collaborate with wet-lab scientists to define tractable optimization objectives and encode domain-specific priors and constraints.
• Prototype modeling frameworks using internal and public datasets, and benchmark and validate their performance.
• Serve non-domain experts to democratize first-principles analysis.
• Stay current with computational biology research and prototype novel algorithms for the company’s discovery or development workflows.
• Contribute to the long-term research roadmap and serve as a thought leader for scientists.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed