Research Engineer - Post-Training

Helical is building an application layer that makes biological foundation models usable for real-world drug discovery. The Applied Research Engineer - Post-Training will own the post-training lifecycle for biological foundation models, designing alignment and validation pipelines, running experiments on distributed GPU infrastructure, and deploying therapeutic-specific tools for pharma clients.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement post-training pipelines that align biological foundation models to specific therapeutic contexts and client use cases
• Build validation frameworks that connect model improvements to biological ground truth—working with embeddings, perturbation data, and external resources like OpenTargets
• Own experiments end-to-end: from hypothesis through training runs on distributed GPU infrastructure to analysis and client delivery
• Collaborate with ML engineers on training infrastructure and with biologists on ensuring outputs are scientifically meaningful
• Contribute to our open-source tooling (helical-package) and help shape the technical direction of our post-training capabilities as we scale
• Stay at the frontier of post-training research and bring relevant advances into production