Senior AI Researcher – Foundation Models

Description About Immunai: Immunai is an AI-driven platform company focused on improving drug discovery and development by decoding the human immune system. We combine large-scale single cell immune data, advanced machine learning, and strong engineering to help pharmaceutical and research partners make better, more informed decisions throughout the drug development process. Our long-term goal is to reduce drug development failure rates and help more effective medicines reach patients. We’re building this platform thoughtfully and collaboratively, bringing together expertise across biology, AI, engineering, and business. Immunai is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. About the role: We are looking for a Senior AI Researcher to join Immunai’s foundation models team and help advance large-scale models for single-cell RNA (scRNA) data. In this role, you will focus on training and improving transformer-based and deep learning models, developing algorithmic solutions to challenging modeling problems, and adapting modern foundation model techniques to biological data. This is a hands-on research position for someone who enjoys building and training deep models, understanding their behavior, and pushing them to perform better. You do not need prior biology experience — but you should be excited to apply your deep learning expertise to a new scientific domain. Location: Ramat Gan, Israel (hybrid model) What will you do? Develop, train, and refine transformer-based and related architectures for large-scale scRNA data. Tackle challenging modeling problems with thoughtful, principled approaches. Apply ideas from NLP and vision (pretraining, self-supervision, transfer learning) to biological data. Plan careful experiments, perform ablations, and deeply analyze results to guide model improvements. Engage directly with large, noisy biological datasets and build intuition for model behavior in this setting. Partner with engineers, data scientists, and biology experts to turn research ideas into working systems. Requirements Required qualifications: MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related scientific field 3+ years of hands-on experience training deep learning models (e.g., transformers, vision models, or related architectures) Strong practical experience with PyTorch (or similar frameworks) Solid understanding of optimization and representation learning Proven ability to develop algorithmic solutions to complex problems Strong experience in experimental design, statistical evaluation, and working with large, complex datasets Ability and willingness to adapt to a new domain (biology) Preferred qualifications: Experience with large-scale pretraining Experience with foundation models Experience adapting methods across domains Research publications or meaningful research contributions Experience in computational biology or biomedical data (a plus, not required) Desired personal traits: You want to make an impact on humankind You prioritize “We” over “I” You enjoy getting things done and striving for excellence You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures You have a growth mindset You are candid, authentic, and transparent When you apply for a role at Immunai, we process your personal data (such as CV, contact details, and professional background) to assess your suitability for current and future roles. Your information may be shared internally with relevant employees and stored or processed by trusted service providers, some of whom may be located outside your country of residence. You can read more about how we process data here: https://www.immunai.com/privacy-policy/