--- title: 'SWE - Distributed at Achira' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/swe-distributed-achira-san-francisco-d8wh3r550t76' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # SWE - Distributed at Achira - **Company:** Achira - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2025-10-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/achira/ae3f3253-d9f0-4581-ab27-513f570df5ad ## Job description ## Why Achira - Join a world-class team of scientists, ML researchers, and engineers working together to reshape the future of drug discovery. - Work on cutting edge ML infrastructure at frontier scale: massive compute, massive data, and massive ambition. - Own impactful work end-to-end — from ideation to architecture to deployment on large-scale infrastructure. - Work in an environment that rewards rigor, speed, and a builder’s mindset. ## About the Role Achira is building best-in-class foundation models to solve the most challenging problems in simulation for drug discovery and beyond. Atomistic Foundation simulation models (FSMs) as world models of the physical microcosm span machine learning interaction potentials (MLIPs), neural network potentials (NNPs), and diverse classes of generative models. We're seeking a Software Engineer passionate about distributed computing and its applications in machine learning. You'll have the opportunity to architect and build from the ground up the infrastructure for our ML data generation pipelines, model training, and fine-tuning workflows across large-scale distributed systems. Your expertise will ensure our compute clusters are efficient, observable, cost-effective, and reliable—helping us push the boundaries of ML development. If you're passionate about distributed systems, performance optimization, and cloud cost efficiency, we'd love to hear from you. You'll be empowered to eat, breathe, and think about the orchestration of complex workloads on multiple vendors scattered anywhere on the planet. Achira is a company which lives and breaths on computation, facile access at the lowest cost for our uniquely suited workloads is a mission critical endeavor. ## What You’ll Do - Architect & Build: Design, implement, and optimize distributed compute infrastructure for ML data processing, training, and fine-tuning. - Optimize & Monitor: Improve cluster observability, scheduling, and resource utilization (CPU/GPU/TPU). - Compute Efficiency: Research and implement cost-efficient compute solutions (spot instances, auto-scaling, multi-cloud strategies). - Tooling: Develop tools for monitoring, debugging, and performance tuning of large-scale ML workloads. - Collaboration: Collaborate with ML engineers to accelerate training pipelines and reduce bottlenecks. - Innovation: Stay current with emerging technologies in distributed computing (e.g., Ray, Kubernetes, Spark, Slurm) and apply them strategically. ## About You - You are excited about and have lots of experience in building or working with distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Ray, Dask, Celery) - You have a good grasp of parallel computing, job scheduling, and resource management. - You're comfortable identifying and resolving performance issues in distributed systems (profiling, bottlenecks, network overhead) - You've implemented solutions using cloud compute platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cluster orchestration (Kubernetes, Slurm) - You are familiar with popular ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX) and MLOps best practices such as model deployment and GPU performance monitoring Eligibility In compliance with United States federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to provide required employment eligibility verification documentation upon hire. ## 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. [datanyze.com](https://www.datanyze.com/companies/achira/5000059998) ## Other roles at Achira - [People Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-achira-san-francisco-2ww83xn8nzc3) — San Francisco, CA - [ML Research Scientist (MLRS) - Representation Learning for Molecular AI](https://feeny.ai/job/ml-research-scientist-mlrs-representation-learning-for-molecular-ai-achira-san-g4avp0c6b7k4) — San Francisco, CA - [ML Research Scientist (MLRS) - Generative AI](https://feeny.ai/job/ml-research-scientist-mlrs-generative-ai-achira-san-francisco-6ye40kf8h9a1) — San Francisco, CA - [CADD / Application Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/cadd-application-scientist-achira-new-york-7sw69t5gkw6h) — New York, NY - [Machine Learning Research Engineer (MLRE) - GPUs](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-research-engineer-mlre-gpus-achira-san-francisco-j6mm7fjed50y) — San Francisco, CA - [Machine Learning Research Engineer (MLRE) - Workflows/Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-research-engineer-mlre-workflows-systems-achira-san-francisco-0vf8drtv0h8m) — San Francisco, CA - [Machine Learning Research Engineer (MLRE) - Research](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-research-engineer-mlre-research-achira-san-francisco-nh4m4asmxj8h) — San Francisco, CA