Founding AI Scientist, Pathology Lead

Sophont builds open, universal medical AI that understands pathology, neuroimaging, clinical text and more, empowering clinicians and researchers worldwide.

We are a public-benefit corporation driven by a mission to build AI models and applications to advance healthcare and benefit humanity. Together with MedARC, our open-source Discord community, we are dedicated to open science and developing frontier AI models for medicine transparently. We already have a strong track record, having published open-source well-cited research in NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, Nature Biomedical Engineering, etc. As part of our radically transparent approach, you can already join our public meetings to see how we conduct research at Sophont and MedARC.

Sophont is a rare early-stage company with both world-class technical leadership and a mission that matters. Joining Sophont means you are paid to lead and contribute to high-impact medical AI research that will transform healthcare and life sciences.

Our team is composed of leaders in their respective domains, backed by investors from Google (Jeff Dean, Logan Kilpatrick), W&B (Lukas Biewald), HuggingFace (Clem Delangue), Kindred Ventures, Upfront Ventures, and more.

How We Build 

Sophont functions differently than other startups. There is no clean separation between thinking and doing. The same people deciding what should exist are the ones building it.

A large part of that work happens in the open. Through MedARC, an open science Discord community, Sophont staff lead groups of highly motivated contributors running experiments, testing ideas, and pushing new directions forward continuously. It is closer to a live research lab than a traditional team.

About The Role 

We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist to lead our pathology foundation model strategy, setting the direction for how these models are built, evaluated, and translated into real clinical and pharma applications. This role is not limited to improving models in isolation, but defining how foundation models interface with biological context, multimodal data, and downstream decision-making systems. It requires someone who can operate across research and deployment, turning new ideas into working systems that hold up in real-world settings.

We have previously built and released OpenMidnight, a state-of-the-art open-source pathology foundation model trained on only twelve thousand slides. This role would significantly expand upon the research behind OpenMidnight.

This is an early start-up role, meaning that you will contribute to the building of a company from the ground up, making it a unique and exciting experience. This role is more than just a team contribution; it's an opportunity where you will have direction, ownership, and impact. 

What You'll Do 

* Lead, contribute to, and execute efforts to pre-train and fine-tune self-supervised and multimodal vision models on pathology and multimodal data

* Build and experiment with modern architectures optimized for biomedical applications

* Writing papers and publishing at top conferences and scientific journals

* Build distributed training and inference pipelines, experiment tracking systems, and evaluation frameworks

* Collaborate internally at Sophont on additional foundation model projects across a wide range of medical domains (text, genomics, etc.)

* Lead MedARC contributors to assist in foundation model development

* Stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in AI/ML infrastructure and tools, self-supervised vision and multimodal training opportunities to enhance our model’s capabilities.

* Contribute to publications in top-tier ML and biomedical venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Nature, Cell, etc.)

Requirements

* Experience with training self-supervised vision models (DINO, MAE, SimCLR, etc.)

* Strong publications or technical blog posts that demonstrate impactful work (e.g., conference papers, journal articles, open-source write-ups)

* Strong command of modern architectures: Transformers, attention mechanisms, state-space models, mixture-of-experts, etc.

* Experience on GPU clusters and ML infrastructure (Kubernetes, SLURM, or equivalent)

* Strong software engineering fundamentals

* Clear communicator, able to present complex technical work to both engineering and scientific audiences

Preferred

* Experience with biomedical foundation models

* Background in oncology, cancer biology, or drug development

* Experience with multi-modal learning and cross-modal architectures

* Familiarity with regulatory considerations in healthcare AI (FDA, HIPAA)

* Experience and contributions in the open-source ML ecosystem (e.g., HuggingFace, W&B)

* Experience with Discord-based public research communities (e.g., MedARC, EleutherAI, LAION)

* Experience in a start-up environment

Location 

Fully remote with the ability to mostly dictate their own working hours, provided they can attend core collaboration meetings.

Compensation 

The salary range for this role is 100,000 - 300,000 USD per year. Benefits include meaningful equity, OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions, 401(k) with 4% match, medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance. Employees will be encouraged to publish/open-source their work and participate in workshops, hackathons, and conferences.