Senior / Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer

Position Description

Calico seeks Machine Learning Research Engineers to join our rapidly growing ML team. You will play a critical role establishing the engineering culture for frontier ML research in drug discovery. You will bring a high level of engineering rigor to our machine learning efforts and accelerate our research maturing into tangible clinical and product impact.

This will be a high agency role designed for a builder who wants to operate as a founding member of a new functional group.

Please note: No biology or life sciences background is required for this role.

Position Responsibilities

You will drive the engineering vision behind our machine learning models, from identifying high-impact ML research opportunities to delivering production-grade systems. Partnering closely with biology-fluent ML researchers and Data Engineers, your responsibilities will span the following areas:

• Advance Foundational ML Capabilities:
• Translate new ideas and prototype models (e.g., diffusion networks, vision transformers, and DNA sequence models) into highly-optimized and scalable JAX or PyTorch code on accelerators
• Dive deep into model architectures to optimize training and inference performance, implementing advanced strategies such as model parallelism
• Research Engineering:
• Proactively identify emerging engineering gaps required for expanding our research capabilities
• Architect solutions for complex systems challenges, such as asynchronous execution, hardware orchestration, and high-throughput data pipelines
• Build foundational libraries that enforce software engineering rigor
• Force Multiplier:
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and scientific workflow tools that accelerate the company's whole research lifecycle and allow the team to rapidly test promising ideas

Position Requirements

• A strong intellectual curiosity for life sciences
• BS/MS with 7+ years or PhD with 4+ years of relevant experience
• Expertise in Python and JAX or PyTorch
• Track record of building, training, or optimizing advanced ML architectures (e.g., transformers, diffusion networks, GNNs) from concept to publication or production
• Must be willing to work onsite at least four days a week

Nice to Have

• Experience working with biological, medical, or chemistry datasets
• Contributions to open-source ML projects or first-author ML publications
• Experience training models across distributed systems and optimizing performance
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., GCP, Kubernetes, Docker)
• Advanced degree in computer science

Pay and benefits

The estimated base salary range for this role is $220,000 - $290,000. Actual pay will be based on a number of factors including experience and qualifications. This position is also eligible for two annual cash bonuses.