AI Biologist - Pathogen Countermeasures

AI Biologist - Medical Countermeasures

Latch builds rigorous scientific benchmarks (benchmarks.bio) for AI agents across biology. We work with frontier labs and pharma to measure whether agents can handle real biological workflows: the messy, multi-layer reasoning that matters in the field.

We’re seeking an AI Biologist to join our Medical Countermeasures team, pushing what AI can achieve in vaccine, antibody, and antiviral development against respiratory viruses.

About the Role.

You will be the scientific authority on ground truth, testing whether agents can reason like an expert countermeasures scientist. The benchmark covers vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and antivirals for influenza, RSV, and coronaviruses. AI agents today struggle to interpret raw neutralization, epitope, and drug-response data, to separate real escape or resistance from assay noise, and to make the advance-or-kill calls an expert would stand behind.

You’ll work with scientists and engineers to build the tasks and datasets behind our benchmarks, and your judgment will set the standard agent outputs are held to.

Build the task

• Turn real countermeasure workflows into tasks with clear, gradable answers: antigen and immunogen comparison, epitope mapping, neutralization and cross-reactivity, antiviral susceptibility, and resistance interpretation
• Write gold-standard answers from raw data, with tolerances that reflect real assay, replicate, and strain variability
• Curate data: neutralization titers, binding and epitope maps, serology time courses, EC50 and dose-response curves, and viral sequences with resistance markers

Set the hard calls

• Test whether agents can tell real escape or resistance from artifact: a titer drop that’s really assay drift, a passenger mutation mistaken for a resistance marker, or a single fold-change not backed by sequence data
• Test whether agents separate binding from neutralization, immunogenicity from protection, and lab resistance from clinical relevance
• Test whether agents account for immune imprinting, waning, and cross-resistance when ranking candidates

Judge the agent

• Challenge conclusions that sound right but wouldn’t survive a program review
• Pinpoint where agents go wrong, what an expert would do instead, and what evidence would change the call
• Reward explicit uncertainty over confident guesses

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands‑on experience in either vaccine/antibody development or antiviral development, ideally in respiratory viruses (influenza, RSV, or coronaviruses)
• Deep expertise in at least one of the areas below, in priority order within each track:
  Vaccines and antibodies
  • Vaccine antigen design, immunogen engineering, or therapeutic antibody discovery
  • Epitope mapping, neutralization, cross‑reactivity, and immune recognition
  • Comparative evaluation of vaccine or antibody candidates from experimental data
  • Antibody responses, immune imprinting, or waning immunity
  Antivirals
  • Antiviral susceptibility and resistance, including phenotypic drug‑response and viral sequence data
  • Antiviral discovery, mechanism‑of‑action studies, or experimental evaluation of candidates
  • Treatment‑emergent resistance, cross‑resistance, and resistance‑marker interpretation
  • Antiviral assay development, validation, and dose‑response analysis
• PhD in immunology, virology, microbiology, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience
• You’ve analyzed the data yourself, not just supervised it
• AI‑ready: daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, or similar, with the judgment to spot answers that are technically correct but scientifically wrong
• Confidence to overrule an AI agent, and openness to update when shown wrong

Culture @ Latch

We practice radical transparency: you’ll know how the company is doing, what’s working, and what isn’t. It’s always us…