Machine Learning Scientist, Scientific Reasoning Models, AI for Drug Discovery

About the role

Roche's AI for Drug Discovery (AIDD) group is looking for a Machine Learning Scientist to join the Foundation Models team within Prescient Design (Genentech). The role contributes to internal reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) and helps them succeed on drug discovery tasks such as biomolecular design. It sits at the intersection of engineering and research, designing and scaling large machine learning systems.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement and improve large-scale distributed machine learning systems, writing robust, performance-critical code and contributing to core infrastructure.
• Develop strategies to improve model performance on scientific tasks, including long-horizon task completion and complex reasoning.
• Translate biological and chemical domain knowledge into machine learning objectives, training signals and evaluation criteria.
• Design evaluation methodologies and benchmarks with domain experts, and curate high-quality data.
• Work with researchers to turn prototypes into scalable, production-ready systems.
• Write clean, efficient code to test hypotheses on reasoning and alignment, maintain training infrastructure and data pipelines, and help implement novel algorithms from research papers.

Required profile

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics or a related quantitative field with 2+ years of relevant experience, or PhD with 0-2 years.
• Strong publication record at top-tier venues (e.g. NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
• Experience developing and training large-scale models, including post-training techniques for domain knowledge, reasoning and alignment.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience with high-performance computing systems.
• Preferred: experience with molecular modalities (protein sequences, chemical graphs, structured molecular data), a public research portfolio or open-source ML contributions, and a passion for applying frontier AI to drug discovery.

What we offer

• Expected salary range of $141,100-$262,100 for New York City (higher for San Francisco); actual pay depends on experience, qualifications and location.
• A discretionary annual bonus may be available.
• The position qualifies for the benefits described in the original listing.
• Relocation benefits are not available.