Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco office

Employment Type: FullTime

About Chai Discovery

Chai is an applied research lab working on AI to unlock biology. Our models design new molecules for new medicines. Scientists across industry are adopting our software platform to develop drugs with engineering precision and discover treatments to "undruggable" disease.

Our founders have been at the forefront of this field since its inception. We raised $230m from Thrive, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Dimension and other tier-one investors. We partner with global life sciences companies like Eli Lilly on deals that are transforming the industry landscape.

We are known for talent density, rigorous research and pace of execution.

About the role

We are hiring an engineer obsessed with building systems and infrastructure that are as simple as possible while being flexible and resilient. You will build the compute and infrastructure systems underpin our product surface, model inference, and evaluation suite. You’ll work closely with product engineers, researchers, and our commercial team.

You have built services that developers love, moved and scaled AI/ML systems into production, and can help us predict and preempt objections that might prevent leading biopharma organizations from adopting our platform.

After years of foundational R&D, Chai's models are moving beyond protein structure prediction into real-world therapeutic engineering. This is a chance to bring the most advanced AI drug design models to market, working alongside a craft-obsessed team of micro pessimists and macro-optimists.

About you

You are mission-driven and want to define the gold standard for purposeful AI technology. You should have:

Software experience:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or related field.

• 5+ years experience building production systems with proven + modern tooling, working with platform, security, and product teams.

• You can see around infrastructure corners.

• Have had end-to-end ownership of 24x7 infrastructure observability, alerting and incident response.

• Have been part of 0-to-1 buildouts as well as 1-to-n scale-ups, have the scars to prove it, and bring an always-evolving playbook of best practices and philosophies with you wherever you go.

Communication & collaboration

• Enjoy pair-reviewing code, writing docs, and sharing knowledge with teammates.

• Able to explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and to translate scientific requirements into engineering tasks.

Mindset:

• Take ownership of what you build... you are "on call" by default.

• Mission- and purpose-driven; you like the idea of your life's work going to create better cures

• Driven to iterate fast with a bias for shipping—without breaking things

• Question assumptions, with diplomacy.

• Clear communicator and respectful colleague.

• Operate well under pressure and thrive in fast-moving environments.

We offer

• Frontier technology: work on the technologies that promises to fundamentally change how new therapeutics are created.

• World-class people: work with world-renowned leaders in the AI x Biology ecosystem.

• Velocity and ownership: we move incredibly fast and liberally distribute ownership, which means continuous learning and career growth opportunities are guaranteed.

• Strong culture and mission: we foster a supportive culture that is mission-driven and high-energy.

• Highly competitive compensation: we attract the best talent and compensate them accordingly.