Founding Scientist (Organic Chemistry)

San Francisco · Full-time · $120–180K depending on what you bring

$10k referral bonus for successful hires (half equity, half cash).

It's Monday, 10 AM. You walk through the glass doors at the San Francisco lab, grab a coffee, grab a Red Bull, and pull up the overnight dashboard.

Yesterday's cell and mouse data has already been crunched. The house AI parsed the PK curves, flagged the outliers, and ranked the candidates while you slept. Two peptides from last week's batch showed decent half-lives. One was a dud. You skim the summary, make a note, and move on.

At noon, the head of science from a major AI lab walks in. He's got access to a frontier model that isn't public yet and wants to understand your assay data well enough to train on it. You spend forty-five minutes at the whiteboard explaining dose-response curves to someone who understands transformers better than anyone alive but has never pipetted anything.

At 3 PM, the last step is done. Synthesized, purified, QC'd. That peptide didn't exist this morning. You made it.

You hand it off to the in vitro team. At 4 PM it's tested in cells. Most do roughly what you'd expect — modest activity, nothing to write home about.

But one of them is oddly potent. Ten-fold over the nearest analog. We checked it twice. You may have just made the most potent peptide of its class ever synthesized.

In the next room, an automation engineer finishes programming the OpenTrons to run our assays faster. She calls you over to validate the protocol under your supervision — by next week, one step takes half the time.

By 5 PM it's dosed in mice. By 8 PM you have preliminary data.

One day. Synthesis to animal data. One day.

The team goes to dinner at the poké spot in Mission Bay. Someone argues about whether the potency data is real or a lucky artifact. You think it's real, but you don't say that yet. You'll know tomorrow.

The Mission

In the age of ever-improving AI capabilities, we humans are lagging behind. We're hungry, distractable, tired. A third of our day is spent unconscious. Half of us get cancer, half of us get heart disease. We're incapable of sustained high performance. We fall ill. The modern world feeds us slop that leads even further down the drain.

We believe that humans are capable of more.

We believe in excellence. We believe in superpowers. We believe in the extraordinary.

We're small core team. In 6 months, we have designed 270+ therapeutic candidates, run 72+ placebo-controlled mouse trials, and completed 79 custom syntheses. We're planning first-in-human safety for 2026 — which would be a world record for a non-vaccine therapeutic built from scratch. Our founding scientific advisors include Professors at Harvard and MIT. At the pre-seed stage, we raised $12M in funding.

What does a future look like where we can systematically identify, validate, and induce beneficial capabilities?

The Role

You'll be one of the founding scientists at the company. We're targeting first-in-human dosing by mid-2026. If we hit it, this is also a world record for moving a non-vaccine therapeutic into the clinic from scratch.

Most biotechs take weeks to go from synthesis to animal data. Here, it happens in one day. You synthesize peptides in the morning, run them through our cell assays by afternoon, test top candidates in mice by evening, and hand the results to our ML team overnight to design the next version. We do not know of another lab on earth running this loop at this speed.

One day. Synthesis to animal data. One day.

Start-ups are unique. Roles aren't as ossified or constrained as in a large corporation--you'll often learn a new role every few months, enabling you to grow as a person and team member. Keep this space for growth and variability in mind when reading this rough outline of what working together could look like.

As we are spinning out multiple deep research projects, if you want to lead your own program, we are open to that. Weird ideas are welcome!

More concretely, you will…

• Run Fmoc SPPS on the Liberty Blue — design the sequences, own the synthesis, troubleshoot failed couplings and difficult aggregating peptides

• Purify on the Agilent 1260 and 1290 prep HPLC — method development, fraction collection, yield optimization

• Confirm structure and purity by LCMS on the Agilent 6530 — you read a spectrum and know immediately if something is wrong

• Hand candidates to the in vitro team with a clear synthesis summary and QC data they can trust

• Pick up in vivo work over time — mouse dosing, PK sampling, plasma processing — prior experience not required, good hands and curiosity are

• Troubleshoot on the fly — failed coupling, mystery yield loss, peptide that won't dissolve — you don't wait to be told what to try next

What you'll get

• If we hit our 2026 timeline, your name is on the fastest non-vaccine drug to reach the clinic.

• In a year you'll have run synthesis, cell assays, animal studies, and ML-driven design.

  • More than most scientists have learned in a decade.

• Your experiments directly determine what goes into humans.

You might be a fit if:

• You picked up a hard technical skill (flow cytometry, mass spec, animal work) in weeks, not semesters

• You are a deeptech generalist who has shipped hard projects under time pressure

• You published before or shortly after graduating (first author or meaningful contribution)

• You've won a competitive fellowship, scholarship, or research award (e.g., Goldwater, NSF GRFP, HHMI)

• You built something in a lab that wasn't handed to you — troubleshot a new assay, optimized a protocol others gave up on

• Your PI would say you were in the top 1% of students they've trained (not an exclusion criterion)

• You're the person teams rely on when experiments need to be planned and executed

This role suits early-stage scientists, graduate students, hands-on researchers—or scientists who miss building from scratch

Working together

• $120,000 - $180,000 per year, with room for upside and promotions as the company grows.

• Generous equity on a vesting schedule, at least $100k worth of equity under our standard vesting schedule

• Healthcare.

• Your Capable budget: $500+ per month to spend on training, supplements, medication, and everything that you need to become your best self.

How we work:

• Small team, high trust, high agency

• High responsibility

• We prefer written clarity over meetings

• We move fast by parallelizing, being decisive, and keeping quality systems lightweight but real

• We care about speed, safety and quality, not paperwork theater

• If you find a better way, you can change the system

All of this is open to conversation--we'll work with you to make it work.

You'll work alongside the founding team—small, lean, moving fast

JOIN THE FOUNDING MOMENT.

We review every application personally.

Note: $10K referral bonus applies if we end up working together for 90+ days.