--- title: 'Machine Learning Research Engineer (MLRE) - Research at Achira' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-research-engineer-mlre-research-achira-san-francisco-nh4m4asmxj8h' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # Machine Learning Research Engineer (MLRE) - Research at Achira - **Company:** Achira - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-04-29 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/achira/08b9b6bd-9f8f-4a7d-9fdd-48bb19affe20 ## Job description ## Why Achira At Achira, we are building a team of world-class scientists, ML researchers, and engineers to work together to move beyond the beaten path in drug discovery. We are actively exploring the next frontier of model architectures for AI x Chemistry: developing world models for the physical microcosm. Our goal is to make biology at the molecular level something that can be learned, predicted, and designed. At Achira, you’ll operate at the frontier scale of massive compute, massive data, and massive ambition. You’ll own impactful work end-to-end, from ideation to architecture to deployment on distributed infrastructure. We are a well-funded, talent-dense organization that values rigor, speed, execution, and an ownership mindset. We’re looking for new members who share our sense of relentless urgency and are natural collaborators who value team success. ## About the Role We're looking for a rare individual who thrives at the intersection of applied machine learning research and rigorous software engineering. You will advance the state of the art in foundation simulation models by implementing and experimenting with internal and literature-sourced ideas, participating with research teams to scale our ML systems, train and evaluate models, and engineer scientific prototypes into production. While we prefer candidates willing to work from our San Francisco office, highly skilled candidates may be considered for working from New York City with travel to San Francisco as needed. Both locations are offered as hybrid roles, spending at least some of your time working from the office in collaboration with coworkers. Travel is part of all roles at Achira, both to conferences and corporate on-site activities ## What You’ll Do - Design and run experiments to test out hypotheses on the path to foundation model development. - Engineer meaningful evals and metrics which enable rapid model iteration. - Design, build and maintain scalable, reproducible libraries for training, experimentation evaluation, and simulation, in service of large-scale research initiatives. - Implement model architectures both from the literature and developed in collaboration with our in-house researchers that push the boundaries of molecular simulation. - Enable agent-driven research and workflows and maintain guardrails on agentic tooling. - Help prepare manuscripts, software artifacts, and datasets for public release. ## About You - Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience not just building one-off scripts but reproducible pipelines for research, writing necessary documentation, and observing coding best-practices. - Track record of observable artifacts (e.g., GitHub, papers) showing work in ML or scientific computing libraries. - Solid working knowledge of PyTorch and JAX and the modern ML research stack. - Comfortable with HPC or large-scale compute environments, and used to thinking on the scale of hundreds or thousands (or even more!) fits running at once. - Sufficient scientific depth to engage with the research questions, whether developed through prior industry experience or during a PhD. ## Nice to Have Even if you hit none of these bonus features, we encourage you to apply! - Experience with equivariant architectures, geometric deep learning, or GNNs (NequIP, MACE, SchNet, PaiNN, or similar). - Familiarity with generative modeling: diffusion models, flow matching, score-based methods. - Regular involvement in open-source ML or scientific computing libraries. - Experience building agent-driven research, active learning, and data curation pipelines. ## About Achira ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Achira builds atomistic foundation simulation models that blend geometric deep learning, generative AI, physics, and quantum chemistry to power the next generation of drug discovery and materials design. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage) - **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: John Chodera (CEO/President), Theofanis Karaletsos, Zavain Dar (Board) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Biotechnology Research / AI-driven Drug Discovery - **Target customers**: Pharmaceutical and biotech R&D teams (B2B); drug discovery scientists seeking advanced computational tools - **Mission or purpose statement**: To create a fundamentally new way of modeling and simulating the world at the atomistic scale, turning intractable extrapolation problems into tractable interpolation problems by learning the underlying physical laws that govern matter. ## Products & Services - **Molecular World Models**: A new class of foundation simulation models that blend geometric deep learning, generative AI, physics, quantum chemistry, and statistical mechanics. These models are designed to deliver unprecedented performance across biomolecular applications, transforming drug discovery and materials design into true inverse design problems. - **Agentic Discovery Platform (in partnership with NVIDIA)**: Announced at BIO2026 (June 2026), this platform advances molecular world models for agentic discovery, leveraging NVIDIA's computing infrastructure. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: **$33M in total funding** (Seed round, March 2025) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Dimension, Amplify, NVIDIA, Compound - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount of 17 employees (+54.5% YoY, +6 people) - 82% of staff in technical roles (machine learners, quantum chemists, engineers) - High-profile hires from D. E. Shaw Research, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and other top computational science teams - Partnership with NVIDIA announced at BIO2026 ## Competitive Advantages - **Third-path approach**: Unlike pure ML methods (which are data-hungry) or traditional molecular dynamics (which is computationally limited), Achira's models learn the underlying physical laws, making them exceptionally data-efficient for out-of-distribution prediction. - **World-class team**: Founders and technical staff with deep expertise in quantum chemistry, machine learning, and drug discovery, drawn from top institutions. - **NVIDIA partnership**: Direct access to cutting-edge computing infrastructure and co-development resources. - **Foundational technology**: Their approach is positioned as a platform technology applicable across drug discovery and materials science, not just a single-product solution. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Building and scaling molecular world models; advancing agentic discovery capabilities; expanding the team of machine learners and software engineers; partnering with drug discovery scientists to validate and deploy models in real-world scenarios. - **Direction for growth**: To become the foundational computational layer for programming matter, enabling inverse design across biomolecular and materials applications. ## Why Work Here - **Culture highlights**: A team of "machine learners, quantum chemists, engineers, computer scientists, and entrepreneurs" united by an "uncompromising drive to build the foundational technological substrate for programming matter." Emphasis on intellectual ambition and scientific rigor. - **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Presence in New York, NY (HQ) and Italy. Specific policy not stated, but the team is currently 94% US-based. - **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Opportunity to work on the frontier of AI + physical sciences; high concentration of technical talent (82% of staff); direct collaboration with NVIDIA; chance to shape a foundational technology from an early stage. The company actively seeks "machine learners and software engineers" and encourages applicants even if no perfect role is listed. ## Sources 1. [achira.ai](https://achira.ai/) 2. [achira.ai/about](https://achira.ai/about/) 3. [achira.ai/careers](https://achira.ai/careers/) 4. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/achira-ai) 5. 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