Machine Learning Research Fellowship (12-18mo Fixed Term)
BigHat Biosciences
Software Engineering, Data Science
San Mateo, CA, USA
Posted on Nov 19, 2025
The Role: We are seeking talented, hard working associates to join our Machine Learning team for a fixed-term role.
At BigHat Biosciences, we’ve re-framed antibody drug development as an iterative, machine learning–driven, multi-objective optimization problem. Our roboticized high-throughput wet-lab continually adds to our large proprietary datasets, which are piped through a custom data management and orchestration layer to automatically update and deploy the latest models. This makes development of complex, net-gen therapeutics ‘trivially parallelizable’, at a pace which only accelerates as we develop better ML tooling.
As an ML Research Fellow you’ll work on developing novel ML models as well as helping with routine ML support of our ongoing therapeutics programs. Applications include multi-modal models of antibody biophysical properties, de novo and structure driven protein design, better protein language models, and active learning and bayesian optimization methods for embedding these models in our design-build-test loop, amongst many others. You’ll be mentored by an experienced ML scientist from our team and work closely with an interdisciplinary team of engineers, wet-lab scientists and drug developers to ensure your work is relevant for active drug development programs.
- Department
- DS/ML (Data Science/Machine Learning)
- Employment Type
- Fixed Term Contract
- Location
- San Mateo, CA
- Workplace type
- Hybrid
- Reporting To
- Hunter Elliot
Key Responsibilities
- Identify, evaluate, and deploy the right models and sequence engineering methods within our weekly antibody design-build-test workcell.
- Develop and evaluate novel ML models or sequence optimization approaches to solve antibody engineering challenges relevant to BigHat’s therapeutics programs.
- Support model building, active learning, and drug development efforts for ongoing BigHat partnerships.
- Work with an interdisciplinary team of biologists, data scientists and machine learning scientists to gain sufficient domain familiarity to ensure your work is impactful.
- Work within, and contribute to, a production-grade codebase and associated ML Ops infrastructure to maintain high levels of automation for existing and new models.
- Document and present the results of your efforts to the relevant BigHat departments.
Skills Knowledge and Expertise
- BS, MS, or PhD degree in ML, CS or in the hard sciences with significant ML experience and a strong math and prob/stats background.
- Strong competency in Python, familiarity with PyTorch, exposure to modern software engineering best practices.
- Strong communication skills, sufficient biomedical domain knowledge to interact effectively with diverse scientific teams.
- Nice-to-haves include experience with protein structure modeling, de novo design, familiarity with antibody biology, and experience training and deploying models on AWS.
About BigHat Biosciences
BigHat Biosciences designs safer, more effective biologic therapies for patients using machine learning and synthetic biology.
BigHat integrates a wet lab for high-speed characterization with machine learning technologies to guide the search for better antibodies. We apply these design capabilities to develop new generations of safer and more effective treatments for patients suffering from today’s most challenging diseases.
BigHat integrates a wet lab for high-speed characterization with machine learning technologies to guide the search for better antibodies. We apply these design capabilities to develop new generations of safer and more effective treatments for patients suffering from today’s most challenging diseases.
BigHat is a Series B biotech outside San Francisco with a team-oriented, inclusive, and family-friendly culture. Our broad pipeline of wholly-owned and partnered therapeutic programs span many disparate indications with high unmet need, such as cancer, inflammation, and infectious disease. BigHat has raised >$100M from top investors, including Section 32, a16z, and 8VC.
Our Hiring Process
Stage 1:
Applied
Stage 2:
Initial Conversation | Head of Talent
Stage 3:
Initial Conversation | Hiring Manager
Stage 4:
1st Technical Screen
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