SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 219,000 - 233,000 / annual
Insitro is a physical AI company developing a Virtual Human™ platform to unlock causal human biology and accelerate drug discovery. The company combines computational biology with high-throughput imaging and machine learning to identify novel genetic intervention points and translate them into therapeutics across metabolic disease and neuroscience.
As Staff Software Engineer on the Imaging Software team, you will define and expand computer vision and ML infrastructure across the full imaging data lifecycle—from microscope acquisition through high-throughput ML pipelines. You'll partner daily with lab scientists, ML scientists, and microscopy teams to translate research prototypes into validated screening workflows that operate reliably at laboratory automation scale.
Key responsibilities include:
**Platform & Tooling**: Design and scale platform capabilities for ML-powered high-content imaging screens. Build robust tools and interactive interfaces for data exploration, quality assessment, and visualization that enable scientists to iterate quickly on experimental data. Own complex end-to-end projects with thoughtful architectural trade-offs and incremental delivery.
**Production Hardening & Data Integrity**: Scale and harden image processing and ML workflows from research prototypes to systems processing millions of images daily. Establish best-in-class practices for data integrity, lineage tracking, reproducibility, and observability across the imaging data lifecycle. Write clear technical specifications and documentation.
**Cross-Functional Partnership**: Work closely with lab scientists, ML scientists, and microscopy teams to translate experimental needs into actionable technical plans. Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar across the team.
You bring 8+ years building and operating production-grade software and high-throughput data pipelines, primarily in Python. You have designed and deployed scientific computing pipelines, visualizations, and QC processes for large-scale imaging or high-dimensional datasets. You're hands-on with Python-first ML stacks, distributed compute (PyTorch/Lightning, Ray, Kubernetes), and workflow orchestration (Argo, Airflow, redun). You thrive translating abstract research needs into practical, scalable software and are motivated by enabling scientific breakthroughs through robust platform engineering.
Based in South San Francisco with a hybrid schedule of three days per week in-office, reporting to the Director of Imaging, Cellular Machine Learning.
