Job Description

Job Title: Senior Scientist – AI Lead (f/m/d) 80-100%

Join Our Innovative Biotech Company - Athebio

Founded in late 2019, Athebio is a profitable highly innovative biotech company dedicated to making a meaningful impact in drug development. We specialize in developing advanced biotherapeutics with pharma partners based on Designed Ankyrin Repeat Proteins (DARPins) and enable the design and creation a variety of modalities including radiotherapeutics, ADCs, AAV, LNP and T cell engagers.

We explore and unlock the full therapeutic potential of repeat proteins and make it broadly available, with a commitment to scientific excellence, innovation and teamwork. Our mission is to support innovative drug developers to create next-generation biologics by providing tailor-made repeat proteins and supporting them with in-depth expertise and superb service.

A Role You Will Shape: This is a newly created position with a company-wide mandate. You will decide, together with the management, what artificial intelligence means in practice at Athebio — and then implement it across the organization.

AI Practitioners Welcome: If you have a proven track record of professionally using AI tools in the daily work processes of a biotech company far beyond e-mail drafting and creating summaries for you and your colleagues, we’d love to hear from you.

Science First: We are looking for a person with a solid knowledge on proteins, from selection to design (preferably partially hands on as well). Everything you build here will serve the purpose of making our science work faster, better, and/or more reliable.

Growth Opportunity: Are you ready to grow with us? At Athebio, you won’t just be an employee; you’ll be an active participant in shaping our company’s future.

Your responsibilities

Make AI Real at Athebio: Shape the next stage how AI is used at Athebio. From fragmented single use to an establishment of a company-wide secure AI environment such as Claude Cowork and make sure it is widely adopted and used effectively across the company, not merely installed.
Teach and Multiply: Help colleagues in research, project management and business functions to use AI well in a life-science setting. Run hands-on sessions, build internal playbooks, prompt and skill libraries, and be a key point of contact when they get stuck.
Build Agents for DARPin Discovery: Design and build agentic workflows that orchestrate publicly available protein-design tools around our Athebody® DARPin scaffold, e.g., turning a partner target structure into ranked designs and focused libraries for our selection platform.
Project leader skills: Work with the end in mind and successfully manage AI deployment and in silico binder generation for the benefit of Athebio. You successfully communicate with stakeholders on all levels and prioritize achievable, tangible delivery over the “ideal” solution.
Streamline How We Work: Map our internal processes end to end, find where time and accuracy are lost, and re-design them with automation from campaign documentation and data analysis to partner reporting.
Set the Standard: Define how AI is used responsibly at Athebio, what may be shared, how outputs are verified, how work is documented and thereby protecting both our trade secrets and our scientific rigour.
Knowledge Expansion: Track a rapidly evolving field, identify developments with practical value, and continuously expand your own and the team’s expertise.

Key requirements

- M.Sc. or Ph.D. in biochemistry, molecular biology, protein science, bioinformatics or a related life-science discipline.
- Minimum of 5 years of experience in a life-science research environment, ideally in biotech or pharma.
- Demonstrable “super-user” command of current AI assistants and agentic tools such as Claude Cowork applied to real scientific and operational work. Please describe concrete examples in your application.
- Practical programming ability, in particular Python, and comfort working with the command line, APIs and version control.
- Solid grounding in data science and data management: structuring datasets, working with databases, and using electronic lab notebook or LIMS platforms such as Benchling.
- A genuine talent for teaching: able to explain technical concepts to non-technical colleagues and to get people to actually change how they work.
- Critical thinking, a healthy scepticism towards AI output, and a problem-solving attitude.
- Pragmatic goal-oriented approach and ability to drive tasks independently with minimal guidance.
- Team player with proactive communication and ability to adapt to changing priorities in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment.
- Good written and verbal communication skills in English.

Additional assets

- Hands-on experience with protein structure prediction or de novo design tools such as AlphaFold, Boltz, RFdiffusion or ProteinMPNN.
- Experience with display technologies (ribosome, phage or yeast display) or with next-generation sequencing data from selection campaigns.
- Experience building agentic workflows or automation around third-party scientific software, including containerisation and workflow orchestration.
- Familiarity with GPU and cloud compute environments.
- Awareness of data governance, IT security and confidentiality practice in a commercial R&D setting.
- German language skills.

What we offer

- A newly created role with a company-wide mandate and direct visibility with management — you will define what AI at Athebio looks like.
- The budget, compute and tooling to build things properly, together with support for your own continued training.
- An exciting opportunity to take responsibility and grow both professionally and personally within a growing biotech company that has reached break-even.
- Space to actively contribute and impact the development of the company.
- Chance to learn from world-leading experts in the DARPin technology.
- Multifaceted activity within a collaborative environment.
- Joint team activities, such as sports, game nights, excursions, and many more.

Our Location

Join us at our state-of-the-art facility located in the Bio–Technopark in Schlieren, Zurich.

Workplace type: On-site

Starting date: Flexible

Are you interested? Awesome! Drop us an e-mail with your CV and motivational letter to talent@athebio.com or click below. (Applications without a motivational letter will not be considered)

Athebio

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Senior Scientist – AI Lead (f/m/d) 80-100%