Research Scientist – AI for Life Sciences — Aspire Life Sciences Search, San Francisco Bay Area

Aspire Life Sciences is recruiting research scientists, computational biologists and bioinformatics engineers for a scientific AI company expanding its research team. You’ll develop evaluations that leading AI labs and pharmaceutical research teams use to measure how reliably AI agents interpret experimental data and make scientific decisions.

Each position focuses on one scientific discipline. We welcome applications from specialists in biologics development, drug discovery and development, peptide discovery, structural biology, proteomics, metagenomics, microscopy or neuroscience.

The role

Working alongside scientists and software engineers, you’ll take a research problem from your field and turn it into a test that can be run across different AI models. Your responsibilities will include:

• Selecting real datasets and defining the scientific decision an agent must make, such as whether assay results justify advancing a molecule or whether an apparent biological signal is an artefact.

• Using Python or R to analyse the raw data yourself and establish a reference answer.

• Writing scoring criteria that account for experimental variability, uncertainty and alternative interpretations the evidence supports.

• Reviewing model outputs to identify where the analysis or scientific reasoning breaks down.

• Working with engineers to make each evaluation reproducible and measure how performance changes between models.

Your experience

You have recent, hands-on research experience in one of the disciplines above and write your own code in Python or R to analyse scientific data. You can explain the methods you chose, how you checked your results and what decision followed from your analysis.

You use AI tools such as Claude or Cursor in your work, can assess their outputs independently and write clearly about scientific evidence. Depending on the specialism, relevant experience may come from academia, biotech or pharma. Most positions require a relevant PhD, while some consider a master’s, a professional doctorate or equivalent industry experience.