Breakout Ventures · 11 hours ago
AI/ML Engineer (Member of the Technical Staff)
Cambridge, MA
Full-time
Onsite
Entry, Mid, Senior LevelBreakout Ventures is looking for an AI/ML Engineer to join Transfyr Bio, a company focused on building physical AI for science. The role involves developing machine learning systems that learn from real-world scientific execution data to provide insights and automation, requiring strong ML fundamentals and collaboration with engineers and scientists.
Advanced MaterialsEnergyFinancial ServicesLife ScienceVenture Capital
Responsibilities
Learn from Messy Reality: Build ML systems that learn from real-world scientific execution data where feedback is delayed, labels are incomplete, and outcomes are confounded by how work was actually done
Fuse the World: Collaborate with perception engineers to design multimodal learning pipelines that combine vision, audio, sensor data, metadata, and outcomes into coherent representations of scientific workflows
Solve Credit Assignment: Develop models that can reason about why an experiment succeeded or failed when intent, execution, environment, and outcome are tightly entangled
Know When the Model Is Unsure: Build systems that surface model confidence / uncertainty, enabling scientists to understand when to trust a recommendation and when to intervene
Close the Loop: Integrate models into real workflows where outputs influence both human decisions and robotic actions, and model behavior must remain robust as protocols, operators, and environments change
Generalize, Don’t Memorize: Ensure models learn transferable structure rather than lab- or site-specific artifacts, enabling insights to carry across experiments, teams, and geographies
Lay the Groundwork for Automation: Enable future physical AI systems by ensuring models learn from execution-level data, not just outcomes, building foundations for automation that can work in the real world
Qualification
Required
Strong programming expertise with experience in software engineering, data systems, and AI/ML product development
Strong grounding in machine learning, with experience building models that learn from noisy, real-world data rather than clean, static datasets
Experience working with or reasoning about multimodal systems (e.g., vision, audio, sensor data, metadata, text), and an intuition for how different signals complement or confound each other
Fluency in Python and modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch), with experience training, evaluating, and iterating on models in real systems
Experience designing data pipelines and training/evaluation infrastructure that evolve over time as new data arrives and assumptions change
Understanding of what it takes to move from prototype to production, including monitoring, iteration, and maintaining models as environments drift
Ability to work across the stack in close collaboration with software and perception engineers, understanding that model performance depends on the surrounding system
Strong fundamentals, curiosity, and the ability to quickly learn new tools, models, or domains as the problem demands
High agency. You don't wait for perfect datasets or well-posed problems. You identify what needs to be learned, build the right scaffolding, and push work forward
Biased toward action. You prototype quickly, test assumptions against real data, and iterate based on failure rather than waiting for theoretical certainty
Successful in ambiguity. You can make progress when labels are incomplete, feedback is delayed, and success criteria evolve over time
Thoughtful. You understand when sophistication helps and when it obscures, and you make deliberate tradeoffs between model complexity, robustness, and operational cost
Clear, direct communicator. You can explain model performance and limitations to collaborators across engineering, science, and operations
Intense. You care deeply about the mission, work hard when it matters, and help keep the team oriented toward what actually moves the needle
Preferred
A passion for and experience in science
A passion for and experience with AI
Demonstrated experience working in fast-moving/ambiguous environments (like startups!)
Benefits
Low/no-cost health insurance options
HSA
401K with matching
Lunch subsidy
Company
Breakout Ventures
Breakout Ventures is an early stage fund that backs bold scientist entrepreneurs.
Founded in 2016
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
unknown2018-01-01Seed
Leadership Team
Dana Watt
Partner
Julia Moore
Managing Partner
Recent News
2025-04-16
2025-04-16
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