Principal AI Researcher
Recursion Pharmaceuticals is hiring a Principal AI Researcher for a remote role open to applicants in United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Recursion Pharmaceuticals.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include computer vision, NLP and AI research.
- Level lists 12 other open roles at Recursion Pharmaceuticals.
- The role was posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
Drive frontier AI research and development for biomedical discovery, virtual cells, and precision health.
Your work will change lives. Including your own.
The Impact You’ll Make:
Human biology stems from four billion years of evolution, which creates a proliferation of complexity and heterogeneity. The combinatorial explosion of biological hypotheses easily surpasses the number of atoms in the universe. Meanwhile, medical discovery advances at the snail pace of clinical trials, each taking years and costing over $100 million. As we enter the era of precision health and try to tailor treatments for each individual, continuing on today's discovery processes is clearly unsustainable.
With the confluence of digital transformation and intelligence revolution, we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop a unifying biomedical world model by bridging virtual patient and virtual cell, and turning real-world data into a discovery engine to close the loop of clinical care and drug discovery. As a Principal AI Researcher, you will join our cross-functional team of top-notch scientists, engineers, and drug hunters in the quest of scalable biomedical discovery. You will work at the forefront of AI-powered drug discovery, advancing frontier research and end-to-end applications across discovery, design, and translation.
The Team You’ll Join:
Recursion is a pioneer in AI-native drug discovery. In the past decade, we have built an unparalleled array of infrastructures across drug discovery and clinical development, operating one of the largest AI compute clusters in biopharma, and spearheading industrial-scale phenomics for perturbation data generation at cellular resolution, long before "virtual cell" entered the mainstream. United under the mission of “decoding biology to radically improve lives”, we offer a unique vibrant environment that features frontier research, industrialized wet and dry labs, and real-world delivery, with close feedback loops and rapid iterations, much like a lean startup. You will join fellow experts across research and engineering, biology and medicine, business and operation, who are similarly committed to accelerating biomedical discovery and democratizing precision health for everyone in the globe.
The Experience You Will Need:
- PhD in ML, NLP, computer vision, or the equivalent practical experience
- Passionate about real-world applications and impact
- Strong verbal and writing communication skills
- 10+ years of frontier AI research experience
- Experience with large datasets and cross-functional AI projects
- Experience in biomedicine and drug discovery a plus; willingness to learn a must!
#LI-DNI
The Values We Hope You Share:
- We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
- We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
- We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
- We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
- We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
- We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.
Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.
More About Recursion
Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives. Recursion is advancing a portfolio of differentiated investigational medicines across its wholly owned and partnered pipeline in oncology, rare disease, neuroscience, immunology, and other therapeutic areas with significant unmet need. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, an AI-native, end-to-end drug discovery and development platform integrating biology, chemistry, and clinical development into a unified intelligence system. Powered by proprietary multimodal data, purpose-built AI models, and bilingual teams fluent in both science and AI, the Recursion OS is designed to translate complex science into medicines that matter — faster, better, and at scale — for patients who are waiting.
Recursion’s platform infrastructure is anchored in Salt Lake City, Utah and Milton Park, Oxfordshire, where its automated biology and chemistry laboratories generate proprietary data at industrial scale. Recursion also maintains offices in New York, Montréal, and London, three global hubs for talent and leadership at the intersection of AI and scientific innovation. Learn more at www.recursion.com, or connect on X and LinkedIn.
Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.
Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
How we rate this
Principal AI Researcher at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rates 95 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Walk me through a computer vision problem you solved, from raw data to a deployed model.
- What NLP problem have you worked on, and how did you measure whether it actually worked?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where deep learning was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Computer vision, NLP, AI Research, Machine learning, and Deep learning. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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