Founding Engineer

Why Join

You will be founding engineer #1 or #2 at a company that is already selling to the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. That is rare at this stage. The code you write will directly determine whether a drug candidate advances or gets stopped: decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to our customers and, downstream, the patients waiting for those medicines.

You will pair-program with the founders on hard, novel problems at the intersection of high-performance computing, scientific algorithms, and AI. The founding team has 15+ years of domain expertise in the science our software automates. You will not be guessing at requirements or building to a spec handed down from a PM. No scientific background is required. We will teach you everything you need to know about the domain. What we cannot teach is the drive to move with urgency and the desire to build something that matters.

What 10x Science is Solving

10x Science (YC W26) develops frontier AI models with deep memory to redefine how scientists understand and engineer biology across the life sciences, starting with drug development.

AI-powered drug discovery is flooding the pipeline with new candidates faster than the industry can evaluate them.

Before a drug candidate can advance to the clinic, scientists must deeply characterize the protein therapeutic to understand whether it will work.

Today, that process takes months of manual, error-prone analysis. It is the bottleneck holding back the entire industry.

Our AI-native platform automates it, giving drug developers the confidence to advance the right candidates and stop the wrong ones early.

The Team

We built the field of next-generation protein characterization out of Carolyn Bertozzi’s Nobel laureate lab at Stanford. No one had turned it into software until now.

David (Co-Founder, CEO) is a Stanford postdoctoral scholar and Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow who has spent 15+ years on the science this platform automates, with foundational publications across the Nature family of journals, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and other leading scientific publications.

Andrew (Co-Founder, COO) trained at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he built the analytical tools pharma uses to understand how drugs bind their targets, before joining the Bertozzi lab at Stanford.

Vishnu (Co-Founder, CTO) is a 2x YC founder who was the founding engineer at Nooks and helped scale them through their Series B. You will report directly to Vishnu.

We are already working with multiple top-10 pharma companies and have enterprise contracts in motion. We are well-capitalized and focused on building.

The Role

You will join a three-person founding team and build the core platform from the ground up. You will pair-program directly with the founders on bare-metal, high-throughput, AI-native software that is already being deployed to top-10 pharmaceutical companies.

This will be the highest-leverage work of your career. The systems you build will process data that no existing software can handle at the speed and accuracy our customers require. You will write fundamental algorithms, architect performance-critical infrastructure, and ship code that reaches production on a weekly cadence. The problems are genuinely hard, genuinely novel, and have a direct line to patients receiving better medicines faster. You will be reporting directly to the CTO, Vishnu.

Our Culture

We are a small team that moves with extraordinary momentum. We are building something that has never existed before, and we are doing it on a timeline that most people would consider unreasonable. That is by design. We believe the best work happens when exceptional people commit fully to a mission that matters, when they operate with total ownership, and when the pace itself becomes a source of energy rather than fatigue.

We are looking for people who share that drive. People who are frustrated by bureaucracy and convention. People who wa