Member of Technical Staff, Translational Medicine

Member of Technical Staff - Translational Medicine

Latch builds rigorous scientific benchmarks (benchmarks.bio) that measure how well AI agents perform real biology. Frontier AI labs and pharma use them to answer one question: can an agent handle the messy, multi-layer reasoning that real biological work demands?

Every benchmark is grounded in real experimental and clinical work, including designing experiments, interpreting data, reading clinical endpoints, and advancing compounds. Each is built by scientists who've done that work themselves.

We're roughly 95 people in San Francisco, backed by Lux Capital, Coatue, Fifty Years, Haystack, Jeff Dean, Alec Nielsen, and George Church.

We're seeking a Member of Technical Staff to lead our Translational benchmark and define how the field measures AI in this domain.

About the Role

You will lead the clinical side of what Latch measures. You will define the translational endpoints in our therapeutics and disease benchmarks and determine whether a model’s answer is correct in the sense that matters to a treating physician, investigator, or regulator.

You will also help obtain clinical data required to build these benchmarks. The most useful data is often not public. It sits within archived clinical trial records, patient registries, health systems, nonprofits, academic centers, and biotechnology companies. Access depends on trust, sound agreements, and a clear understanding of how sensitive data should be handled.

What You’ll Do

• Define and own the translational endpoints used across our therapeutics and disease benchmarks. You will be expected to defend those decisions.

• Turn real drug programs and clinical-trial designs into tasks on which AI agents can be scored. Failed trials are especially useful when the reason for failure is known.

• Serve as the clinical authority for our omics, therapeutics, and biosecurity teams. Before Latch makes a clinical claim about a disease, you will be the final reviewer.

• Establish data partnerships with patient cohorts, nonprofits, health systems, academic centers, and biotechnology companies.

• Negotiate data-use agreements and build the consent, de-identification, compliance, and review processes required to work with clinically sensitive data.

• Build the clinical function at Latch, beginning with advisors and eventually hiring and building a team.

Requirements

• You hold an MD and have completed residency.

• You have defined or defended a clinical endpoint in a Phase I, Phase II, or Phase III clinical trial.

• You have served as a physician or named investigator on at least one Phase I, II, or III clinical trial. You can explain the molecule, patient population, dose rationale, safety profile, endpoint selection, and the responses from the FDA or safety monitoring board.

• You have authored FDA regulatory documents such as IND, clinical trial protocols, investigator brochure, BLA/sBLA filings, and medical device authorizations.

• You have a working command of disease development and can reason from a phenotype to its possible molecular or genetic basis.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in rare disease, oncology, solid tumors, or gene therapies.

• Familiarity with frontier AI model performance benchmarks.

• You have taken data-use agreements through execution yourself. You understand consent, de-identification, and IRB review well enough to design the process.

• You have secured a data or research partnership with a patient group, nonprofit, academic center, health system, or biotechnology company.

• Familiarity with HIPAA, GDPR, and NIH controlled-access systems, including dbGaP and Data Access Committees.

• Regular use of AI tools in clinical or scientific work, along with specific views about where those tools fail.

Culture @ Latch

How we work. Genuinely flexible schedules— we only ask that you are extra communicative when you're coming in later than usual. We care most about hard work and output. We're respectfully opinionated, it will always be us against problems, never each other. We optimize for each other's time and bring solutions, not just problems.

Office & Perks. Waterfront office near Oracle Park, 2x free daily meals, unlimited snacks, company outings most months, and team offsites. Plus a vibrant Latch community: cycling, soccer, figure skating, boxing, run clubs, reading clubs, martial arts, music, game nights.

Compensation & Logistics

• Full-time, in-person

• Unlimited PTO (truly)

• Work Visa sponsorship

• Flexible Spending Account

• 401 contribution (no match)

• Profit Share + Ambitious Equity

• Team-wide science reading groups

• 100% covered Health, dental, vision

• Relocation Assistance (if applicable)

• Lunch and dinner provided every workday

• Waterfront office in China Basin, San Francisco

• Company-sponsored professional development

• Flexible working hours, so long as you maintain an onsite presence

• Best office dog: Nix

Interview Process

1. Intro Screen (30m): Recruitment Team

2. Intro Technical Screen (30m): Member of Technical Staff/CTO

3. Deeper Technical Screen (1hr): Member of Technical Staff/CTO

4. Onsite Work Trial: 2-3 days (we will take care of all accommodations)

5. Decision: 1-3 days after your interview