---
title: 'Tech Lead Manager - Full Stack at Medra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/tech-lead-manager-full-stack-medra-san-francisco-b4qgaw64cnxw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Tech Lead Manager - Full Stack at Medra

- **Company:** Medra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai/b67c2035-8e7d-44cb-9b54-8dac5824f31a

## Job description

## WHAT WE'RE BUILDING:

At Medra, our mission is to use AI, robotics, and biology to accelerate life science research, with the ultimate goal of eradicating disease. We have been quietly building the foundational layers of our Physical AI Scientist platform:

🤖 Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity.

🧪 Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously.

This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.

## THE TEAM:

- We're a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers and scientists from companies like Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. We're collaborative and love moving fast, both with our product and on team trips skiing or go-karting!
- As a team, we love nerding out about engineering and robotics — plus other topics like race cars or cooking. We like learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other.
- Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don't mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.

## IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

- Own the architecture and implementation of full-stack systems end-to-end — writing code daily and being in the critical path on the hardest problems, not delegating them.
- Design and implement user experiences that spark joy in our customers.
- Build kick-ass internal tools to allow us to build, support and scale our robotic fleet across multiple customer deployments.
- Set the technical direction and quality bar for full-stack engineering, and make the hard tradeoff calls on design, scope, and prioritization.
- Grow a small team of talented full-stack engineers — hiring, mentoring, and unblocking them as a force multiplier alongside your own technical work.

## LET'S TALK IF YOU HAVE:

- Deep proficiency with Python and the ability to rapidly implement and iterate on ideas.
- Experience building interactive front-ends with React or similar.
- Experience with TypeScript.
- Understanding of programming for the web (HTML, CSS, JS, HTTP, REST).
- Significant backend system design and implementation experience.
- A track record of being the engineer your team relies on to ship the hardest things.
- Willingness to wear many hats / a flexible attitude towards responsibilities and scope.
- Ability to move fast in an environment where things are sometimes loosely defined and you may have competing priorities or deadlines.
- Passion for learning and expanding your skillset.
- Experience leading or mentoring software engineers — and a desire to keep doing that while remaining hands-on technically.

(OPTIONAL) BONUS POINTS IF YOU HAVE:

- Experience with database technologies like Postgres and Redis.
- Interest and experience in robotics, machine learning, or computer vision (bonus points for past experience working with hardware).

## WHAT WE OFFER:

- An opportunity to change the way that scientific research happens
- Fast-paced, creative, and collaborative work environment
- Significant equity ownership
- 401k
- Medical insurance and dental insurance
- Unlimited PTO
- Weekday dinners

This position is 100% in-person, you must be able to come on-site to our San Francisco office. We offer relocation benefits for applicants who need to relocate.

Medra is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. We value diversity at Medra and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

## About Medra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Building autonomous Physical AI for the lab to accelerate scientific discovery by executing and optimizing experiments in a closed loop.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (340 Pine Street, Suite 100)
- **Founded**: 2021 (some sources cite 2022 – conflicting reports)
- **Founders**: Michelle Lee (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Life sciences automation, laboratory robotics, AI-driven experimental design
- **Target customers**: B2B – biopharma companies, academic research labs, government agencies (e.g., DARPA)
- **Mission / purpose**: Unlock breakthroughs at scale by tightly integrating AI scientific reasoning with physical experimentation.

## Products & Services
- **Physical AI Lab (Medra Lab 001 – ML001)**: A fully autonomous robotic workcell that executes wet-lab protocols (e.g., CRISPR, cell culture, NGS) using computer vision and robotic manipulation. Instrument-agnostic and modular.
- **AI Experimentalist**: The scientific reasoning layer that translates natural-language research goals into executable experiment plans, coordinates multi-step protocols, analyzes results, and refines methods in a closed loop.
- **Platform Type**: Physical AI + Scientific AI as a service (on-site deployment or remote operation via ML001).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $63M (Series A of $52M closed December 2025, preceded by $11M pre-seed in October 2025 and a non-equity assistance from PharmStars in 2023)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Human Capital (lead), Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital, Neo, 776 (Seven Seven Six), Fusion Fund, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 100% YoY (31 employees as of mid-2026)
  - Launched ML001 in San Francisco (April 2026) — largest autonomous lab in the U.S.
  - Announced DARPA collaboration (June 2026) to advance natural-language-to-executable-experiment capabilities
  - 8 open positions across biology, engineering, design, and operations

## Competitive Advantages
- **Closed-loop integration**: Combines physical execution with AI-driven experimental design and learning – not just robotic task automation.
- **Instrument-agnostic & modular**: Works with both manual and automated lab instruments, allowing easy swapping of modules and protocols.
- **Natural-language programming**: Scientists can edit protocols in plain English (written or voice).
- **Scalable data generation**: Logs every action, video, and metadata per sample for traceability and model training.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand partnerships with biopharma, academia, and government (DARPA is a key early customer).
- Advance the AI Experimentalist layer to enable full autonomous hypothesis generation and validation.
- Scale deployments of Physical AI Labs on-site and remotely through ML001.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “intense curiosity and rigorous debate” with clear, direct communication and quick resolution of conflicts through mutual respect.
- **Team**: Community of diverse thinkers, “not just a company but a movement to transform biotechnology.”
- **Work policy**: Likely on-site at the San Francisco lab given the nature of physical robotics; no explicit remote/hybrid policy mentioned.
- **Perks & highlights**: Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + robotics with a high-impact mission; funded by top-tier VCs; strong engineering culture (43% technical staff, many from Neuralink, Applied Intuition, Amazon, Carnegie Mellon).

## Sources
1. [medra.ai](https://www.medra.ai/)
2. [medra.ai/careers](https://www.medra.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/medra-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/medra-ai)
4. [cbinsights.com/company/medra](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/medra)
5. [medra.ai/darpa-collaboration](https://www.medra.ai/darpa-collaboration)
6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai)

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