{"id":3838047,"url":"https://alion.io/job/benchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement","title":"Research Engineer, Model Evaluation and Improvement","company":{"id":4848,"name":"Benchling","domain":"benchling.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/benchling","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.2,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":58,"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":136435,"max":166754,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":166754},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Benchling","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-05T19:38:47Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-05","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T14:20:52Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"We are rebuilding biotech for the AI era.\nWhen a breakthrough is delayed, the world waits. Getting a molecule from discovery to patients, or a crop from lab to field, involves thousands of slow, manual, disconnected steps. AI has the potential to change this, compressing decades of R&D work into years. But that only happens when clean, structured scientific data and AI are built into how science gets done.\nBenchling is the AI platform for biotech R&D. Scientists use Benchling to design experiments, capture structured data, and run AI agents and models directly in their workflows. Over 200,000 scientists around the world trust Benchling to power their most important work, from academic labs to Sanofi, Moderna, and more than half of the world's top 50 biopharma.\nWe’re building an AI scientist for our customers. We can’t do that if we haven’t built the muscle ourselves. AI fluency is the foundation we build on; it's core to how we work, and we're committed to helping every new hire integrate it into their day-to-day. As part of our interview process, you'll complete a brief AI-focused exercise or discussion so we can understand how you think about and use AI to drive impact in your role. Feel free to reference any tools, platforms, or workflows you use today.\nROLE OVERVIEW\nWe’re a team focused on making frontier AI models better at science. LLMs know an extraordinary amount of biology, but there’s still a large gap in reasoning for the real-world problems scientists face every day. We recently published some of our workhere.\nYou’ll build the datasets, evaluations, and systems that help close that gap. You’ll work with scientists to turn complex scientific work into rigorous tasks that models can learn from and be evaluated against. You’ll partner with leading AI labs to understand where models fail and how to improve them.\nThis is an early and rapidly evolving area. You’ll work at the intersection of software engineering, biology, and frontier AI: finding tasks that are challenging for LLMs and valuable to scientists, designing evaluations that capture real scientific judgment, and building systems to create these tasks at scale.\nRESPONSIBILITIES\nBuild datasets for evaluating and improving frontier models, turning complex scientific data into high-quality tasks and environments for LLMs.\n\nAnalyze model failure modes, running experiments across frontier models to understand where they struggle and identify opportunities for improvement.\n\nBuild scalable data infrastructure, creating pipelines that curate, transform, and validate large volumes of scientific data into tasks for model evaluation and improvement.\n\nCollaborate with frontier AI labs, helping develop and evaluate new approaches for improving models on challenging scientific tasks.\n\nWork closely with scientists, translating expert judgment into problems and evaluation criteria that can reliably distinguish strong model behavior.\n\nQUALIFICATIONS\n2+ years at the intersection of biology and AI, with academic or industry experience evaluating and improving scientific models or LLMs for biological applications.\n\nExperience building with LLMs, with an intuition for where current models excel, where they struggle, and how to design systems around their capabilities.\n\nCuriosity and excitement about frontier AI, with a desire to understand and push the capabilities of rapidly improving models.\n\nComfort working on ambiguous problems, where the playing field is rapidly shifting and the right technical approaches are still being discovered.\n\nCollaborative mindset, able to work closely with engineers, scientists, and external research partners.\n\nDesire to work in a fast-paced environment, where priorities can shift and rapid experimentation is encouraged.\n\nHOW WE WORK\nWe prioritize in-office collaboration. Employees are expected to be on-site 5 days per week (Monday - Friday).\nBenchling welcomes everyone.\nWe believe diversity enriches our team so we hire people with a wide range of identities, backgrounds, and experiences. \nWe are an equal opportunity employer. That means we don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4469,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Biotechnology","Scientific & Lab Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-05T21:43:22Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 14 · green card filings: 2","filings_12m":14,"filings_prev_12m":12,"green_card_filings_12m":2,"median_offered_wage_usd":156875,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-08T10:45:15+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":8}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":58,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":166754,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/benchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/benchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T15:40:30Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":33057,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4848},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4848"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbenchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbenchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbenchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/benchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbenchling-research-engineer-model-evaluation-and-improvement"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3838047}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"benchling.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3838047},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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