Machine Learning Engineer (Biotech / Bio-AI)
Ship deep-learning models for proteins, single-cell, imaging, and drug discovery at AI-first biotechs.
AI-first biotechs — Insitro, Recursion, Isomorphic, Genesis Therapeutics, EvolutionaryScale — are hiring ML engineers who can train, fine-tune, and deploy biology-specific foundation models. The role demands strong PyTorch, MLOps, and just enough biology to talk to wet-lab scientists.
Machine Learning Engineer (Biotech / Bio-AI) salary (USD)
US base ranges blended from Levels.fyi, BLS, Glassdoor, and Payscale (2024–2025). See full salary benchmark →
What a ML Engineer (Bio-AI) does day-to-day
- Train and fine-tune sequence, structure, and cell-state foundation models.
- Build distributed training infrastructure (multi-GPU/TPU).
- Productionize models behind APIs used by computational biologists.
- Run rigorous benchmarks against open biology test sets.
Required skills & tools
12-month roadmap to ML Engineer (Bio-AI)
- 1ML core (0–3 mo)Solid PyTorch, transformers, distributed basics.
- 2Bio for ML (3–6 mo)Protein/sequence representations, single-cell foundations, AlphaFold inference.
- 3Fine-tuning (6–9 mo)ESM/Geneformer/scGPT fine-tunes on public benchmarks.
- 4Production (9–12 mo)Triton/FastAPI serving, monitoring, biology evaluation harness.
Job titles to target
- • ML Engineer
- • Senior ML Engineer (Bio)
- • Staff ML Engineer
- • ML Tech Lead
Where they hire
- • AI-first biotech
- • Pharma AI groups
- • Foundation model labs
- • Drug discovery startups
FAQ
Do I need a biology degree to be a bio-AI ML engineer?
No. Strong ML engineers are routinely hired without formal biology training as long as they can learn the relevant data modalities and partner closely with computational biologists.
How much does an ML engineer in biotech earn?
Compensation tracks tech: total comp at top AI-first biotechs commonly reaches $300k–$450k+ at senior level in the US, including equity.
Is AlphaFold experience required?
Helpful but not required. What hiring managers want is the ability to fine-tune and deploy any modern bio foundation model — AlphaFold, ESM, scGPT, OpenFold — on real internal data.
Related career paths
Ready to become a ML Engineer (Bio-AI)?
Generate a personalized 12-month roadmap with curated courses, projects, and checkpoints tailored to your current level.
Build my roadmap free