About the role
About Chai Discovery Chai is a research lab working on AI to unlock biology. Our models design new molecules for new medicines. We are changing how biologists develop drugs, just as language models are changing how engineers write code. Our vision is a design suite for molecules, with applications across life sciences, agriculture, materials and beyond. Our founders have been at the forefront of this field from the beginning. We are backed by Thrive, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Dimension and other tier-one investors. We partner with global life sciences companies like Eli Lilly on deals that are transforming industry. We are known for talent density, rigorous research and pace of execution.
About
the role Security is what earns Chai the trust of the world's largest pharma companies. It's a precondition for the business, not a cost center. We're looking for someone to help own and build the security function end to end. You'll represent Chai's security posture to our partners directly, sitting across from their CISOs and cloud security architects on reviews of our compute architecture, tenant isolation, egress controls, encryption, and key management. You'll drive the changes they surface back into the product and infrastructure and help Chai keep ahead of new risks. Just as importantly, you'll be the trusted security partner to our product and inference engineers, reviewing architecture like our shared inference fleets and per-partner data isolation before they're built, shipping the security controls that are tricky for non-specialists to get right, and automating the compliance, onboarding, and vendor work so the program mostly runs itself. Our models have moved beyond structure prediction into real therapeutic engineering, and the partnerships that come with that raise the bar every quarter. You'll do this alongside a craft-obsessed team of micro-pessimists and macro-optimists. About you We index on judgment, breadth, and the instinct to build security in rather than bolt it on. The archetype is an engineer who specialized into security, thinks about the business as much as the threat model, and would rather partner with engineers than audit them. We look for: 5+ years in security engineering, having built or meaningfully improved a security program at a high-growth company (you have intuition for what a 30-person startup needs versus a 1,000-person one) The ability to write targeted production code (Python, TypeScript), not just scripts Startup or high-growth experience, working close to engineering rather than at arm's length The credibility and presence to represent Chai on customer security calls with pharma CISOs Comfort owning detection, response, and incident management end to end Familiarity with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 as programs to run well, not boxes to check Life sciences or other regulated-industry experience is a
