Director, Machine Learning, Virtual Cell Initiative

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States; onsite at Arc's headquarters

Base salary: $380,000–$420,000 per year, plus eligibility for an annual discretionary bonus.

Company

hirify.global is an independent nonprofit research organization applying artificial intelligence and biology to accelerate scientific progress and understand the causes of complex diseases.

What you will do

• Lead and build a team of six machine learning research scientists and engineers, supported by undergraduate, master's, and PhD students.
• Direct development of a state-of-the-art foundation model and agentic framework for understanding cellular responses to perturbations.
• Work with wet-lab scientists in an active learning loop to shape large-scale, diverse single-cell training datasets.
• Integrate genomics, functional track, and broader omics data beyond scRNA-seq and Perturb-seq.
• Pioneer new machine learning architectures and approaches while staying current with frontier research.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop scientists and engineers supporting the Virtual Cell Initiative.

Requirements

• PhD in computational biology, bioinformatics, machine learning, or a related field.
• At least five years of experience working in or with machine learning.
• Strong experience with frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Proven experience leading research teams in a fast-paced, multidisciplinary environment.
• Experience with or strong interest in biology, with the ability to collaborate with biologists and machine learning engineers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including a strong record of presentations and publications.

Culture & Benefits

• Combine wet-lab data generation with frontier AI modeling in an active learning environment.
• Work with long-term funding and industry-like resources without commercial research pressures.
• Collaborate with computational biologists, experimental biologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs.
• Contribute to research intended to accelerate scientific progress and drug discovery worldwide.
• Receive base compensation in the stated range and eligibility for an annual discretionary bonus.