Founding Research Scientist - Pathology Foundation Models
Posted on April 23, 2026 (about 1 month ago)
Founding Research Scientist - Pathology Foundation Models
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.
About Sophont
We have a strong track record publishing open-source, well-cited research in NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and more. Our approach is radically transparent — public meetings and open community contributions are part of how we run research. The team includes leaders in their domains and is backed by investors from Google, W&B, Hugging Face, Kindred Ventures, Upfront Ventures, and others.
How We Build
Sophont blends thinking and doing: the same people deciding what should exist are the ones building it. Much work happens openly via MedARC, an open science Discord community where staff lead contributors running experiments, testing ideas, and pushing new directions.
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 clinical and pharma applications. The role involves defining how foundation models interface with biological context, multimodal data, and downstream decision-making systems, and expanding on prior work such as OpenMidnight (an open-source pathology foundation model trained on ~12,000 slides).
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
- Write papers and publish at top conferences and scientific journals
- Build distributed training and inference pipelines, experiment tracking systems, and evaluation frameworks
- Collaborate internally on foundation model projects across medical domains, including text and genomics
- Lead MedARC contributors assisting in foundation model development
- Stay up to date with advances in AI/ML infrastructure, self-supervised vision, and multimodal training
- Contribute to publications in top-tier ML and biomedical venues
What We\'re Looking For
- Experience training self-supervised vision models such as DINO, MAE, or SimCLR
- Strong publications or technical blog posts demonstrating impactful work
- Strong command of modern architectures including transformers, attention mechanisms, state-space models, and mixture-of-experts systems
- Experience working on GPU clusters and ML infrastructure such as Kubernetes or SLURM
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Clear communication skills across engineering and scientific audiences
Preferred
- Experience with biomedical foundation models
- Background in oncology, cancer biology, or drug development
- Experience with multimodal learning and cross-modal architectures
- Familiarity with regulatory considerations in healthcare AI including FDA and HIPAA contexts
- Experience contributing to the open-source ML ecosystem such as Hugging Face or Weights & Biases
- Experience with Discord-based public research communities such as MedARC, EleutherAI, or LAION
- Experience in a startup environment
Location
This role is fully remote with flexible working hours, provided you 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 and Anthropic subscriptions, a 401(k) with 4% match, medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance. Employees are encouraged to publish and open-source their work and to participate in workshops, hackathons, and conferences. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.
How to Apply
To apply, send an email with your CV attached to [email protected] using the subject line "[Your Full Name] CV - Pathology Foundation Models".
Application Details
Please attach your CV and use the exact subject line indicated above. Applications via email only.