Senior/Staff AI Scientist (Polytope Bio)

Today's frontier biological AI models are trained almost entirely on static, pre-existing data. They are powerful pattern matchers, but lack feedback from real biology.

Polytope Bio is a residency project at Astera that is building the missing piece: a post-training engine that closes the loop between frontier AI models and high-throughput biology. Our work will power new applications in generative biology by aligning frontier AI models directly to experimental measurements of what actually folds, binds, and functions.

We are looking for a Senior/Staff AI Research Scientist to join our foundational team. You will be joining at the point of maximum leverage: early enough to influence the modeling approaches, experimental design, and training strategy. The project is resourced with significant compute, financial runway, and the ability to generate large-scale prospective biological datasets. The researcher in this role will work hands-on to develop and publish new reinforcement learning methods and generative AI models leveraging datasets created by our unique high-throughput biology platform.