Machine Learning Researcher

About the Role

We are a vibrant and intensely mission-driven team in San Francisco, comprising members from MIT, Harvard Medical School, Roche, ETH, and Dana-Farber.

We value speed and rigor, coupled with excitement, drive, and a strong work ethic. In an early-stage environment, we value people who can bring clarity to open-ended problems, take ownership of the next steps, and follow through with energy.

Capable Labs is a place for ambitious, high-integrity people who want to become dramatically better. You will be surrounded by people who care intensely about the work, get close feedback from the people making scientific and company-defining decisions, and have room to own increasingly important problems.

We believe excellent work should be met with meaningful reward, ownership, and trust. Responsibility is earned through contribution, not title alone: anyone who demonstrates the judgment, rigor, and follow-through to move important work forward can earn meaningful scope.

What You’ll Do

• Identify high-impact bottlenecks across our drug discovery pipeline and develop targeted ML approaches to address them.

• Build systems that support experiment planning, literature triage, protocol drafting, and in silico candidate screening.

• Develop tools to automate work across the preclinical and clinical stack in close collaboration with wet-lab scientists and operators.

• Fine-tune and apply protein and structure models, including ESM, AlphaFold-family models, RFdiffusion, and ProteinMPNN, on in-house data to generate and optimize candidates across programs.

• Develop and implement methods for drug design, including candidate generation, filtering, in silico modeling, and predictive analysis. Relevant approaches may include molecular dynamics, post-training biomolecular models, and probe-based model evaluation.

• Close the loop between in silico predictions and in vivo results using active learning methods.

• Build internal evaluations that measure whether ML systems are accelerating drug development in practice.

Who You Are

• You have, or are eager to develop, strong research judgment in biomolecular modeling.

• You have, or are eager to develop, strong judgment about bottlenecks in end-to-end drug development.

• You care about wet-lab reality and are excited to work closely with wet-lab scientists.

• You take ownership of outcomes end to end: you can prioritize important problems, scope the necessary experiments, develop strong solutions, and present clear results.

• You are curious and data-driven; you enjoy developing and testing hypotheses, and you update your views based on empirical evidence.

• You are motivated to accelerate drug development.

• Bonus: Experience or a strong project history in active learning, biological modeling in data-constrained regimes, or multimodal models spanning omics, imaging, and phenotypic data.

• Bonus: Experience or a strong project history building production-scale agent platforms.

Pay & Benefits

• $130,000-$300,000 salary, plus equity options with an implied current value of approximately $50,000-$200,000 before exercise cost, taxes, dilution, and liquidity risk.

• Compensation will depend on the skills, experience, and scope of impact you bring. If your background, experience, or compensation needs fall outside this range, we are still open to a conversation based on the scope and impact you could bring.

• $500+ monthly wellness budget for training, supplements, coaching, recovery, or other tools that help you perform at your best.

• Healthcare: We offer a broad range of medical, dental, and vision coverage options, with Capable covering 100% of the base policy.

• You will also have access to HSA, FSA, and 401K plans.

• Healthy dinners with the team are provided daily.

• We support visa sponsorship where appropriate, including O-1, H-1B, J-1, TN, and other employment-based pathways. Our team is already international, with members from Canada, Pakistan, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, China, India, and the United States.

Application Process

Our process is fast, transparent, and personal. We care about getting to know the person behind the application.

• Initial application

• First phone screen

• Second phone screen

• In-person work trial in San Francisco: designed to give both sides a realistic sense of working together. Get to know the founding team!

Apply Today

Curious but not sure? Apply anyway. It takes 5 minutes, and you do not need to be actively job searching to start a conversation.

Some of the best people do not map perfectly to a job description. If this sounds like a place where you could do important work, we would like to hear from you.

And if someone exceptional comes to mind, send them our way here. We read every referral carefully, and if your referral joins Capable, we’ll send you a thank-you bonus.