Research Scientist
Chai Discovery
San Francisco, CA · Posted March 6, 2026
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Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
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- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 78 open research scientist listings that state pay, the middle half runs $163,500 to $295,000 and the median is $218,500.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
AI use among medical scientists, except epidemiologists is little observed so far. Measured exposure for medical scientists, except epidemiologists: 4% (little observed).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
About the job
ABOUT CHAI DISCOVERY
Chai Discovery builds the computer-aided design suite for molecules. Eli Lilly https://endpoints.news/eli-lilly-chai-discovery-sign-ai-software-deal/, GSK https://endpoints.news/chai-discovery-signs-gsk-deal-to-make-biologics-with-ai/, 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/, Bristol Myers Squibb https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7496300911523246080/, argenx https://x.com/chaidiscovery/status/2077422480617267230?s=20 and Novartis https://www.chaidiscovery.com/news/novartis-partnership all use Chai to power drug discovery programs. AI is reinventing life sciences the same way it reinvented software engineering, and our team is building that future.
We train frontier models that learn the underlying foundations of biochemical structure and interaction. We pair this with a computational workspace to iterate on molecules from idea to medicine, helping scientists move faster and develop medicines beyond the reach of existing methods.
We value diverse perspectives and are ready to find greatness in unexpected places.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are hiring research scientists with outlier insight who can open new avenues for the work we pursue. Our models have moved beyond protein structure prediction into real-world therapeutic engineering, and we have only just begun. We draw on the best ideas from within our domain and from across the field: pre-training large diffusion models, architecture design, post-training, and inference-time scaling.
Our team comes from physics, math, theoretical computer science, engineering, and computational biology. What we share is a record of getting hard, open-ended problems to work, and together we foster a culture of rigor, smart risk-taking, and constant collaboration. Many of us had never worked on molecules or biology before Chai.
This is the place to apply if your strongest work happened outside AI for biology, or if you aren't sure which of our research roles fits you best.
ABOUT YOU
We are looking for researchers driven by impact. We index on grit, rigor and results.
- A research record of your own, in academia or industry: first-author work, a method others adopted, or a system you got working at scale in the real world.
- Strong reasoning from first principles and sound experimental design, and you're comfortable with ambiguity and messy data.
- Enough engineering to be self-sufficient: you implement your own models and run your own experiments.
We value the work product more than the pedigree, and we are happy bet on rising talent. A strong signal in any field counts, from world models or autonomous systems to top placement at IMO or Putnam.
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 and promote a culture of high velocity and ownership. We compensate our team accordingly.