Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About Chai Discovery

Chai is a research lab working on AI to unlock biology. Our models design new molecules for new medicines. We are changing how biologists develop drugs, just as language models are changing how engineers write code. Our vision is a design suite for molecules, with applications across life sciences, agriculture, materials and beyond.

Our founders have been at the forefront of this field from the beginning. We are backed by Thrive, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Dimension and other tier-one investors. We partner with global life sciences companies like Eli Lilly on deals that are transforming industry.

We are known for talent density, rigorous research and pace of execution.

About the role

We are hiring an engineer obsessed with building systems and infrastructure that are as simple as possible while being flexible and resilient. You will build the compute and infrastructure systems underpin our product surface, model inference, and evaluation suite. You’ll work closely with product engineers, researchers, and our commercial team.

You have built services that developers love, moved and scaled AI/ML systems into production, and can help us predict and preempt objections that might prevent leading biopharma organizations from adopting our platform.

After years of foundational R&D, Chai's models are moving beyond protein structure prediction into real-world therapeutic engineering. This is a chance to bring the most advanced AI drug design models to market, working alongside a craft-obsessed team of micro pessimists and macro-optimists.

About you

You are mission-driven and want to define the gold standard for purposeful AI technology. You should have:

Software experience:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or related field.

• 5+ years experience building production systems with proven + modern tooling, working with platform, security, and product teams.

• You can see around infrastructure corners.

• Have had end-to-end ownership of 24x7 infrastructure observability, alerting and incident response.

• Have been part of 0-to-1 buildouts as well as 1-to-n scale-ups, have the scars to prove it, and bring an always-evolving playbook of best practices and philosophies with you wherever you go.

Communication & collaboration

• Enjoy pair-reviewing code, writing docs, and sharing knowledge with teammates.

• Able to explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and to translate scientific requirements into engineering tasks.

Mindset:

• Take ownership of what you build... you are "on call" by default.

• Mission- and purpose-driven; you like the idea of your life's work going to create better cures

• Driven to iterate fast with a bias for shipping—without breaking things

• Question assumptions, with diplomacy.

• Clear communicator and respectful colleague.

• Operate well under pressure and thrive in fast-moving environments.

We offer

The opportunity to work at the frontier of AI, with world-class people, on a mission that matters. We protect & promote a culture of high velocity and ownership. We offer highly competitive compensation.