Founding AI Engineer

Paris · Full-time

Build AI that can model and reason about human biology.

IROC is building a World Model of Human Biology: AI systems designed to model how biological systems work, change, and respond to perturbations.

We combine structured biological knowledge, experimental data, and AI to make predictions and accelerate scientific discovery.

The foundations are built. Now we're looking for a Founding AI Engineer to push the technology further.

The role

You'll work directly with IROC's scientific and technical founders to develop the AI systems behind the World Model.

You will own the loop from scientific question → model → experiment → training → evaluation, moving fluidly between research and engineering.

You'll have significant ownership over model architecture, training strategy, experimentation, and the technical direction of the platform.

The problems are open-ended: biology is complex, dynamic, and only partially observed. There is no established playbook for building models that can meaningfully represent and reason about it.

What you'll do

• Turn scientific questions into concrete AI and modeling problems.
• Design, train, and evaluate models and architectures.
• Explore approaches across foundation models, representation learning, graph ML, reasoning, and scientific ML.
• Build the data, training, and evaluation infrastructure needed to scale experiments.
• Analyze model behavior and failure modes, and iterate quickly.
• Work closely with scientists to translate biological insight into technical solutions.
• Turn promising research ideas into robust systems.

What we're looking for

We're looking for an exceptional engineer who is deeply curious about AI and motivated by hard scientific problems.

• PhD in machine learning, computer science, applied mathematics, physics, or a related quantitative field, or an MSc with exceptional research and engineering experience.
• Strong ML and software engineering fundamentals, with hands-on experience building and training modern AI models.
• Strong research mindset: able to read papers, formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and turn promising ideas into working systems.
• End-to-end ownership: comfortable moving between research, modeling, infrastructure, and engineering.
• First-principles thinking: excited by open-ended problems without an established playbook.
• Experience with PyTorch, GPU computing, distributed training, foundation models, LLMs, graph ML, representation learning, or scientific ML is a plus.
• Genuine interest in biology, healthcare, and scientific discovery. A biology background is not required.

We care more about what you've built and how you think than about a specific degree, title, or technology stack.

Why IROC

Join a fast-paced, ambitious founding team working on a problem with the potential for enormous scientific impact.

You'll have:

• Exceptional ownership over the models and technical direction of the company.
• Frontier AI problems where existing methods are not enough.
• A direct path from research idea → experiment → system.
• Close collaboration with scientists and founders.
• The opportunity to work on a problem where solving the right technical challenges could have a huge impact on how we understand human biology.
• A competitive salary and package.

We're moving fast, aiming high, and tackling problems that don't have obvious answers.

If you want to push AI towards scientific understanding — and have a chance to make a genuinely outsized impact — we'd love to hear from you.