Member of Technical Staff, Rare Disease

Department: Member of Technical Staff

Location: San Francisco, CA

Employment Type: FullTime

Member of Technical Staff, Rare Disease

About Latch

Latch builds AI agents and benchmarks for biological research, steering frontier AI systems toward breakthroughs in medicine.

More than 10,000 scientists use our agents for R&D. All frontier AI labs use our benchmarks to measure what their systems can do in biology and medicine. We are the only biotechnology company referenced in the biology sections of frontier model cards.

We ground our benchmarks in real biological and clinical work in order to advance AI systems that can design and run experiments, interpret data and clinical endpoints, and advance compounds through clinical trials better than the best human experts.

We are a team of roughly 95 people in San Francisco and remote. Our investors include Lux Capital, Coatue, Fifty Years, Haystack, Jeff Dean, Alec Nielsen, and George Church.

The role

You will be Latch's authority on inherited disease. You will own our rare disease benchmarks and decide what a correct rare disease workflow looks like, from variant to mechanism to therapeutic strategy, so that every task we ship would satisfy a clinical geneticist.

This is a new function at Latch. You will define what it needs as much as you will execute it.

What you will do

• Author and ship the rare disease benchmarks on our roadmap.

• Design tasks that span the rare disease journey, from phenotyping and variant interpretation through diagnosis, therapy matching, and trial navigation, with grading a clinical geneticist would accept.

• Be the scientific authority at Latch for all things rare and inherited disease. Before Latch makes a claim about a rare disease, you are the final reviewer.

• Potentially collaborate on and run drug programs in the wet lab, guiding discovery and development workflows.

• Work with CROs, diagnostic laboratories, and patient foundations to run experiments and gather data that inform the design of our benchmarks and agents.

• Build a function beyond yourself: advisors, partners, and a hiring plan.

What we look for

• You have spent years working hands-on in rare or inherited disease: diagnosing patients, building the pipelines that do, or developing therapies for them.

• You have worked hands-on with trio exome or genome data, HPO phenotyping, and ACMG variant classification, and you know when a negative exome needs RNA-seq or a functional assay.

• You know where real rare disease data lives, from patient registries and natural-history cohorts to diagnostic reports, and can work with foundations and diagnostic labs to obtain it.

• You have strong, defensible opinions about what correct work looks like in your field.

• You want to build a function, not fill a seat.

The interview

One interview will be a detailed discussion of a rare disease case or program you know well: how the diagnosis was reached, the mechanism behind it, and where the workflow could have gone wrong.

Location

This is a full-time, in-person position at our waterfront office in China Basin, San Francisco. The team works from the office five days a week. The role is not hybrid or remote.

Compensation and benefits

• Total compensation ranges from $250,000 to $400,000, depending on experience.

• We believe in long-term incentive plans and provide equity and 401(k) contributions.

• Benefits include a Blue Shield Platinum health plan with 100% of premiums covered, no deductible, and no out-of-pocket costs.

• Daily meals, including lunch and dinner, are provided. Travel and accommodations for scientific conferences and other professional networking trips are included.