Verge Genomics · 11 hours ago
Staff AI Scientist (Foundation Models)
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/StaffVerge Genomics is transforming drug discovery by leveraging artificial intelligence and proprietary human data to tackle rising drug costs. The Staff AI Scientist (Foundation Models) will lead the design and development of neuroscience foundation models, collaborating with engineering and computational biology teams to deliver state-of-the-art performance in disease-specific tasks.
BiotechnologyGeneticsHealth CareMachine LearningNeuroscience
Responsibilities
Assess and nominate one candidate from several potential translational applications for Verge’s first foundation model
Design benchmarks and evaluations to validate the model’s breakthrough performance throughout each stage of its development
Deliver a state of the art model, scoping and hitting key milestones–starting with a proof of concept and culminating in authoring a paper validating its performance through robust experiments
Take a hands on approach to rapidly building a proof of concept that demonstrates the potential for state of the art performance
Lead additional collaborators across data curation, infrastructure, and computational biology as you achieve milestones and scale up Verge’s investment in the model
Translate between biological domain knowledge and AI objectives, both within Verge and between Verge and its AI and industry partners
Qualification
Required
PhD in computer science, computational biology, AI/ML, applied statistics, biophysics, or related field, or MS in related field with exceptional professional experience
Demonstrated experience training and evaluating modern ML methods (e.g. transformers, diffusion-based generative models, graph neural networks, sequence models)
Proven ability to contribute at every stage of the design and delivery of foundation models yielding novel scientific discoveries
Demonstrable ability to design and run non-trivial experiments: controlling for confounders, building robust baselines, thorough error analysis, etc
Exceptional grasp of modern AI/ML frameworks and methods (PyTorch, JAX, Tensorflow, diffusion-based generative models, graph neural networks, etc.)
Preferred
Experience with large-scale data (e.g. 100B+ tokens) or distributed training
Background in computational biology, genomics, or a related field
Experience working with multimodal foundation models
First-hand experience building and evaluating transformer-based models using biological data (e.g. scGPT, Geneformer, ESM, rBio, ProtBERT)
Technical expertise in model optimization (e.g. FSDP/ZeRO, quantization, compilation, custom kernels)
Experience with approaches to federated learning (e.g. NVFLARE)
Company
Verge Genomics
Verge Genomics uses machine learning and human genomics to accelerate drug discovery.
Founded in 2015
51-200 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$134.12MKey Investors
BlackRockThresholdIA Ventures
2023-07-01Series Unknown
2021-12-16Series B· $98M
2018-07-17Series A· $32M
Leadership Team
Alice Zhang
CEO & Co-founder
Victor Hanson-Smith
Distinguished Scientist, Head of Computational Biology
Recent News
2025-06-02
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