Head of Bio AI - Radial
Astera Institute · Emeryville
About Astera
Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.
About Radial
Radial is a research organization within Astera focused on rethinking life science research at a systems level. The systems that enable how we fund, do, and build upon science have long needed an update. At Radial, we design, fund, and operate programs that tackle foundational scientific problems while simultaneously testing better ways to do science. We're looking for people who are willing to take big risks, build useful things and share their learnings in the open.
Position Summary
Mission
Hire a founding technical leader to serve as the CEO’s technical co-pilot; the person who co-architects Radial’s scientific and technical direction, builds the AI and computational infrastructure across programs, and sets the technical bar through their own hands-on work. This is a building role: the Head of Bio AI will personally drive early prototypes, make critical architecture decisions, and help determine what Radial builds, how it builds it, and the standards to which it holds itself.
Key Outcomes (12–24 Months)
Technical Architecture & Program Leadership
Establish AI and computational architecture across current and future programs, beginning with DiffUSE and its expansion across multiple structural biology data modalities.
Shape which foundational bottlenecks Radial addresses and how they become durable technical systems.
Help make build-vs-fund-vs-partner decisions across Radial’s program portfolio.
Hands-On Building
Conceive, architect, and directly prototype early modeling systems and core infrastructure.
Design scalable training workflows, data pipelines, validation frameworks, and evaluation benchmarks.
Evolve capabilities from early prototyping to production-grade, open platforms the scientific community can build on.
Team & Culture
Build a high-caliber AI and engineering team, starting small and scaling deliberately.
Set the technical bar through hands-on contribution and architectural authorship.
Establish a culture of technical rigor, intellectual honesty, and disciplined experimentation.
Ecosystem & Impact
Engage leading scientific collaborators and build technically rigorous partnerships.
Represent Radial’s technical vision within the AI and life sciences communities.
Ensure outputs are structured and shared as durable public goods.
Competencies
Functional Expertise
Deep expertise in modern ML: large-scale training, representation learning, generative modeling (diffusion, transformers, foundation models).
Track record of translating ideas into working, scalable systems.
Understanding of the interplay between machine learning and physics-based modeling
Direct experience formulating and solving inverse problems, including familiarity with ill-posedness, regularization strategies, and the trade-offs between learned and model-based reconstruction approaches
Experience building and iterating on ML pipelines for large-scale, data-intensive problems, including efficient data ingestion, preprocessing of high-dimensional inputs, and training workflows that scale across distributed compute resources
Systems-level thinking across data generation, modeling, infrastructure, and experimentation.
Experience designing technical platforms intended to endure and compound over time.
Scientific range beyond a single modality can engage across problem domains.
Leadership Attributes
Has managed small technical teams; knows how to attract and retain exceptional talent.
Hands-on builder who sets the standard through their own work.
Deep familiarity with the frontier AI x Bio landscape.
Operates effectively in ambiguity; creates clarity through disciplined technical judgment.
Cultural Alignment
Motivated by the chance to build something that doesn’t exist yet.
Committed to open science and durable public infrastructure.
Thrives in early-stage, open-ended environments blending AI and biology.
Location
This role is hybrid, based in Emeryville, CA. The CEO and most of the team are on-site at least 3 days per week.
Compensation
The successful candidate will receive a competitive compensation package commensurate with their experience.
As a nonprofit organization, Astera is exempt from the H-1B cap; visa sponsorship may be available for qualified candidates.