README: Send in a resume via a link or doc and a few sentences on why you’re interested in Forecast via email. Github repos, socials, and a one-liner on what you’re personally excited about these days are also all welcome in bullet point form. hello@forecast.bio
About Forecast
Forecast Bio is building a predictive model that leverages unique neurobiological cellular imaging datasets and human data to achieve the world’s first in-vitro correlate of human neuro-clinical outcomes. (Think less “-omics” and more “dynamics”.)
Forecast’s models learn principles of astrocyte dynamics and their relation to the overarching integration of pharmacological processes that lead to behavioral and other clinical outcomes, which represent disease states, healthy states, and dynamical states in response to perturbations such as drugs. The most challenging problems in translational neuroscience are being solved here; Forecast embodies practicality, leverages of-the-moment AI tools, and brings a realistic lens to how computational science can deconvolve traditional problems in neuroscience. Our ultimate goal is a rational approach to the design and development of treatments for brain health.
Forecast is currently in stealth, operated by a team of biotech and neuroscience entrepreneurs in San Francisco. Our part-time consulting roles offer flexible commitment on a per project basis to start, with the option to be considered for FTE at a later date.
The Role
Forecast is hiring 2–3 part-time engineers to work on a multi-faceted platform and bring creativity to their role. We’re bringing on people with complementary skills and interests with the ultimate aim of converting some or all of our part-time hires to full-time roles.
Our primary goal is to work with individuals who value intellectual autonomy, and bring a practical approach to their engineering work. Over the course of these part-time consulting stints, the Forecast team will be working with the engineers to carve out individual platform responsibilities and R&D projects. Future full-time employment could fall into three general roles: Senior Research Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, and Head of Technology.
Our About You section clearly defines some of the background skills and experiences we’re looking for. Data ingestion and ML pipelines make up the bulk of the work, but we have clear feature expansion and product optimization OKRs, some of which are more experimental than others. Types of data we work with include: time-series fluorescence imaging data, large corpuses of text data, EHRs, cheminformatics inputs, and preclinical drug discovery outputs.
About You
TLDR: We are looking for a “full stack” ML engineer/researcher with experience working in the bio domain. You’ll be involved in helping manage our entire data science flywheel from collecting data to training models to creating visualizations.
● You have a background in computational sciences
● You have experience applying machine learning to biological, chemical, and/or molecular data
● You have work experience outside of academia. The ideal candidate has at least 3 years working in the private sector.
● You are familiar with startup pace and shipping product iterations that aren’t perfect, but represent a minimum viable test of what’s possible.
● You are familiar with different types of biological data; we don’t necessarily need a person with a biology or neuroscience background, but if you have this, even better.
● You have experience with time-series data and/or imaging data.
● You have experience building internal validation criteria for predictive tools (both off-the-shelf and internally built; statistical analyses, predictive validity, etc.)
● You have the following minimum tech skills: strong experience with the standard python data science/ML stack; SKlearn, PyTorch, Numpy, Scikit-Image, etc.; enough systems and data engineering skills to stand up and manage stable, cost-efficient data ingestion, pre-processing, model training, and inference pipelines. Some ability to build basic front-end dashboards and visualizations.
● You are familiar with Claude Code/AI agents and have a desire to use these tools to increase productivity without generating loads of unmaintainable slop code; you understand how to effectively use these tools and have an idea of how to efficiently integrate them into existing workflows.
● You are curious about tech and bio and generally enjoy staying on top of new tools, trends, and science.
● You have exquisite communication skills and can clearly and objectively identify project aims, status, and snags.
● You’re able to distinguish between R&D projects that are translatable and relevant to business value propositions and R&D projects that are “nice-to-haves”.
● You are someone who values accountability and transdisciplinary collaboration.
Our Values
● Practicality. We live in a world that gives us access to an unprecedented volume and diversity of research and computational tools. While we want to constantly assess our ability to leverage tools for efficiency’s sake, we also want to make sure we’re not overengineering solutions. We are a solution-agnostic organization that prioritizes simplicity.
● Honesty. We are aiming to build a team of individuals aligned with the Forecast vision. We value integrity and have an expectation around honesty and transparency when it comes to progress, project status, capabilities, and outcomes. We believe that there’s no such thing as bad news; trip-ups and tough times are often symptomatic of a problem worth solving as a team.
● Accordion-maxxing. We believe that being self-aware and objective is a result of being well-trained in accordion-maxxing: the ability to zoom out and see the bigger picture and implication of any one task, project, or tool in relation to the business’ critical path at any given time, while also being able to hone individual skills and zoom back in for problem solving, when relevant.
● Accountability. Despite the fact that we live in a fast-paced and dynamic job market, we still have a vision of growing a team that sticks around for the long haul. Accountability is the only way to build trust.
What We Offer
● We encourage voicing new ideas, creative and resourceful problem-solving, and contrarian thinking.
● A respectful and open-minded working environment
● Forecast’s leadership will have high expectations around work quality and pace; leadership will regularly share constructive feedback, support you and help you grow, and welcome receiving feedback and ideas from you, too.
● You own your ways of working. What we care about is that we’re taking a rational and honest approach to keeping on track with our OKRs. How we get there as a team is by honoring individual ways of working, whilst also holding up firm best practices around teamwork and communication.
● We encourage learning through doing. As long as we’re honest about where our capabilities fall short, we empower learning new skills through doing.
● Competitive salary and equity in a growing, well-funded startup
● An early seat at a company slated to rewrite how the world develops neurotherapeutics
