New comment by justinyan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)"

Xaira Therapeutics | Midlevel/Senior/Staff Engineers | Seattle or SF

Xaira Therapeutics is developing biological foundation models (not LLMs) to hit undruggable targets and cure disease. We've put together an incredible cross-disciplinary team of pharma veterans who have brought drugs to market, drug designers/AI scientists from Nobel laureate David Baker's lab, and engineers from tech in order to meet the moment and build a company to reimagine how drugs are made in the pursuit of better medicines. We're not a SaaS company, and the ultimate goal is to see the medicines we make delivered to patients.

I lead the engineering team and am hiring across multiple teams. There's:

- Research Engineering: work on a modeling team with the goal of making a model better. You think in tensors, understand what makes a kernel fast, and obsess over training throughput.

- X-Scientist: building an agentic copilot for drug development with access to our internal suite of tools. You have backend experience, have built tools for agents to interact with, and enjoy tinkering with agent harnesses.

- Data Engineering: we generate large volumes of data from our lab that provide critical feedback loops to our modeling efforts. You either hate or love lakehouses, have a preferred ETL orchestrator, and are intrigued by the problem of capturing data off of lab instruments.

- ML Platform: boy do we have some GPUs for you. Modeling teams need productive compute infrastructure, job scheduling, and numerous other affordances so that they can "just focus" on the model. You shudder at the words "falling off the bus", you have an opinion on how checkpoints should be recorded, and you've built tools that improve the modeling lifecycle.

Send me an email to apply: [email protected] Include a resume and tell me about something you've built that illustrates your skills.