Senior Machine Learning Software Engineer (MLOps)

Who We Are

Calico (Calico Life Sciences LLC) is an Alphabet-founded research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies and model systems to increase our understanding of the biology that controls human aging. Calico will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives. Calico’s highly innovative technology labs, its commitment to curiosity-driven discovery science and, with academic and industry partners, its vibrant drug-development pipeline, together create an inspiring and exciting place to catalyze and enable medical breakthroughs.

Position Description

Calico seeks a Senior Machine Learning Software Engineer (MLOps) to own the scaling, reliability, and deployment of our machine learning workloads. You will build the computational backbone to accelerate, scale, and productionize our ML research, serving as the critical bridge between frontier research and production-grade engineering.

If you are passionate about standardizing ML infrastructure, conquering complex distributed systems challenges, and being the core glue that wires up modern toolchains, this is the role for you.

Please note: No biology or life sciences background is required for this role.

Key Responsibilities

You will work with a team of researchers and engineers on Calico’s key strategic cross-functional drug discovery and development initiatives through the following responsibilities:

• Architect the Computational Engine: Design, build, and deploy highly scalable distributed training environments and evaluate and establish the company-wide blueprint for orchestration systems and infrastructure for therapeutic discovery and development
• Build the Serving Infrastructure: Architect the high-throughput inference and serving pipelines necessary for our models to propose and evaluate synthesis recommendations
• Define the MLOps Standard: Architect and implement rigorous, automated systems for ML experiment tracking, model versioning, checkpointing, and artifact registries, ensuring our path to drug discovery is fully reproducible and data-driven
• Mentorship & Leadership: Serve as a subject matter expert and technical mentor, including partnering with our researchers and academic partners to integrate their research into our production pipelines

Position Requirements

• A strong intellectual curiosity for life sciences
• 5+ years of relevant work experience in industry or academia
• Strong software engineering skills with deep expertise in Python and JAX or PyTorch
• Hands-on experience with MLOps practices (e.g., model registries, monitoring, CI/CD for ML pipelines) and modern open-source tools (e.g., Ray, Kubernetes, MLflow, Airflow, Flyte)
• Must be willing to work onsite at least four days a week

Nice To Have

• Hands-on experience troubleshooting distributed training bottlenecks
• Prior experience productionizing ML models for biological or molecular data
• Contributions to open-source projects or academic publications in ML

The estimated base salary range for this role is $209,000 - $233,000. Actual pay will be based on a number of factors including experience and qualifications. This position is also eligible for two annual cash bonuses.