Software Engineer, Product

About this role

ABOUT CHAI DISCOVERY

Chai builds the design suite for molecules. We train frontier models that learn the underlying foundations of biochemical structure and interaction, so scientists can move faster and pursue targets that other methods cannot reach.

AI is reinventing life sciences the same way it reinvented software engineering, and Chai is at the forefront of this shift. Leading pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly https://endpoints.news/eli-lilly-chai-discovery-sign-ai-software-deal/, Pfizer https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2026/06/04/why-pfizer-and-eli-lilly-are-betting-on-this-13-billion-ai-drug-discovery-startup/, and Novartis https://www.chaidiscovery.com/news/novartis-partnership are rapidly adopting our platform to power their drug discovery programs.

Our mission is to accelerate progress towards new cures and better science, and there are countless interesting problems on the road ahead.

About the role

You'll build Chai's software factory for medicine: the applied AI layer and product that turn our foundation models into tools the world's best drug designers use every day. A great model needs the right product around it to be useful, and right now the products we ship provide just as much leverage as the models do. You'll turn raw model capability into something a biologist reaches for instinctively, and carry what they learn back to the models.

Nobody has fully defined what it means to design a medicine on a computer, so this whole category of software is yours to invent.

Our models have moved beyond structure prediction into real therapeutic engineering, and the product has only begun to catch up. Problems include rendering large molecular structures interactively without dropping frames, designing interfaces that let scientists reason alongside the models, and turning messy scientific workflows into something fast, elegant, and repeatable.

You'll work in a tight loop with researchers, scientists, our partner-facing team, and customers.

About you

We index on taste, agency, and ownership. We're looking for engineers who get obsessed with hard problems, ship small and often, and are as comfortable adapting a model to a real task as they are sweating the details of an interaction. We look for:

- 2+ years building and owning production products end to end with modern frameworks (React or Vue, TypeScript, and a Node/Go/Python backend)

- A bias for the smallest amount of code that solves the user's problem well, and real care about pixel-level craft

- Fluency with automated testing, CI/CD, and monitoring for 24/7 services

- The instinct to instrument, read data, and iterate on it

- The ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-engineers, understand what customers need, and translate scientific requirements into engineering work

A background in biology is not required. What makes the difference is technical excellence, curiosity about the domain, and grit. Prior exposure to enterprise or scientific software is a bonus.

WE OFFER

The opportunity to work at the vanguard of AI research and frontier biology, with world-class people, on a mission that matters. We protect & promote a culture of high velocity and ownership. We compensate our team accordingly.

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