Software Engineer, Product

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

Product engineers build the Chai software platform: tools for scientists to query models, visualize molecular structures, and interpret data with our AI in the loop. You'll collaborate on a daily basis with designers, ML researchers, and wet-lab teams to make complex science repeatable. You care about reliability, elegance and utility—on the product surface as well as what's under the hood.

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.

• 3 + years building production web applications with modern frameworks (React/Vue, TypeScript/JavaScript, Node/Go/Python back-ends).

• Have a knack for finding the smallest amount of code to solve a user problem well.

• Care about making pixel-perfect products.

• Data-driven: instrument features, analyze usage, and iterate quickly on feedback

• Familiar with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring/alerting for 24 × 7 production services

• Experience optimizing performance or interactive visualizations is a plus

Communication & collaboration

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

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

Mindset:

• Interest in biotech or computational biology; prior exposure to scientific data, bio-visualization, or HPC workloads is a bonus but not required

• Comfortable iterating quickly in a startup where requirements, and underlying science, evolve fast

• Bias for shipping: you value small, incremental improvements over big-bang rewrites

• Clear communicator who can simplify complex science for external partners and internal stakeholders

• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup where priorities shift and you own features end-to-end, from idea to production and beyond

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.