Founding Machine Learning Engineer
Founding Machine Learning Engineer at Novaflow — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Novaflow
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 150000–250000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
About Novaflow
Novaflow is the AI data analyst for biology labs. Analytics is the bottleneck for scientific discovery. Biologists have to outsource analysis to expensive bioinformaticians or core services and wait weeks or months for results. We're solving this by putting analysis directly back into the hands of researchers, allowing them to go from raw data to publication-ready insights and visualizations in days instead of months. We're well-funded, growing extremely fast, and backed by leading investors including Y Combinator and BioRender.
About the Role
We're hiring a Founding Machine Learning Engineer to build the AI systems that power our platform. The core challenge: take a natural language query from a biologist and turn it into a correct, reliable bioinformatics workflow. That means working with LLMs, building evaluation systems to know when outputs are good (and when they're not), and shipping models that real scientists depend on every day.
This is a high-agency, high-ownership role. You'll work directly with the founders and have real say in our AI strategy. Biology background is not required. What matters is that you're a strong ML engineer who ships.
This role is in-person at our San Francisco office. The founding team works side by side every day to make fast decisions and ship.
What You'll Work On
Build and improve the LLM-powered pipelines that turn natural language into bioinformatics workflows
Design evaluation pipelines and benchmarks to measure model quality against real scientific expectations
Experiment with fine-tuning, RAG, prompt engineering, and different model architectures
Deploy and scale models in production on AWS or GCP
Make build-vs-buy decisions on AI tooling and infrastructure
Work across the team to integrate ML capabilities into the product
Requirements
Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field (PhD is a plus)
2+ years building and deploying ML models in production
Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar
Real experience with LLMs: fine-tuning, RAG, prompt engineering, evals
Experience working with large datasets and building data pipelines
Familiar with AWS or GCP for model training and deployment
Docker and CI/CD experience for ML workflows
Can spot when an LLM is confidently wrong
Nice to Have
Experience applying ML to scientific or biological data
Familiarity with Anthropic, OpenAI, or other LLM APIs and agent frameworks
Terraform and Kubernetes experience
Startup background or experience in research-oriented engineering
Previous startup experience (prior experience either working for or founding a startup)
Why Join Us?
Competitive salary and meaningful equity as a founding team member
401(k) with company match
Unlimited PTO + federal holidays
Monthly health and wellness stipend
Meals covered when you're in the office (lunch daily, dinner when you're working late)
Team offsites and company events
If you're curious about being a founder one day, this is your front-row seat. You'll work side by side with the founders and have full visibility into product strategy, customer conversations, and fundraising as we scale.