Vivarium Lab Lead - Build From Scratch & Drive Breakthroughs

San Francisco, CA – Full-Time – On-site –- $100,000 - $150,000 per year. $10k referral bonus for successful hires (half equity, half cash). It's Monday morning. You walk in, grab your coffee, and look at the vivarium you helped build from scratch. Your vivarium. You check the board. First up: feed the mice. These are your mice - you set them up, you're responsible for everything that happens in this room. A vendor calls. Shipment delayed on the IVC rack you urgently need. Two weeks ago, you would've accepted that. Not anymore. You've learned to find the bottleneck, solve it. Thirty minutes later, the shipment is back on track. Then the chemist hands you a peptide - just synthesized in the rapid in‑house pipeline and ready to be tested. Today it's IV injections. You didn't know how to do that before you got here. Now it's one of a dozen skills you picked up in weeks, not months. This peptide didn't exist 24 hours ago. Our in‑house ML model designed it last night. Is it going to outperform the last version? You dose the mice, set everything up in the in‑house ML tracking system, and two hours later – results. The Mission In the age of ever‑improving AI capabilities, we humans are lagging behind. We're hungry, distractable, tired. A third of our day is spent unconscious. Half of us get cancer, half of us get heart disease. We're incapable of sustained high performance. We fall ill. The modern world feeds us slop that leads even further down the drain. We believe that humans are capable of more. We believe in excellence. We believe in superpowers. We believe in the extraordinary. We're a small core team. In 6 months, we have designed 270+ therapeutic candidates, run 72+ placebo‑controlled mouse trials, and completed 79 custom syntheses. We're planning first‑in‑human safety in 2026 — which would be a world record for a non‑vaccine therapeutic built from scratch. Our founding scientific advisors include professors at Harvard and MIT. At the pre‑seed stage, we raised $12M in funding from the best deeptech investors. What does a future look like where we can systematically identify, validate, and induce beneficial capabilities? The Role We're targeting first‑in‑human dosing by mid‑2026. If we hit it, this is also a world record for moving a non‑vaccine therapeutic into the clinic from scratch. Most biotechs take weeks to go from synthesis to animal data. Here, it happens in one day . We do not know of another lab on earth running this loop at this speed. One day. Synthesis to animal data. One day. You keep the vivarium running, perform core mouse assays, and hand the results to our ML team — who use them overnight to design the next version. Start‑ups are unique. Roles aren't as ossified or constrained as in a large corporation—you'll often learn a new role every few months, enabling you to grow as a person and team member. Keep this space for growth and variability in mind when reading this rough outline of what working together could look like. More concretely, you will… Lead the site end‑to‑end — you own everything that happens in this vivarium Build the vivarium from scratch: IVC racks, HEPA filtration, the full setup Stand up and manage our IACUC program Perform hands‑on mouse work: IP, IV, SC injections, blood collection, behavioral assays, necropsy Cut down vendor timelines — find bottlenecks, solve them, don't accept delays Set up breeding colonies and keep them running Coordinate directly with our chemistry and ML teams — your mouse work is what tells us if the AI‑designed peptide actually works Help build a vivarium that's ready for AGI timelines What you’ll get If we hit our 2026 timeline, your name is on the fastest non‑vaccine drug to reach the clinic. In a year, you'll have built a vivarium from scratch, picked up skills most techs take five years to learn, and started dosing compounds that didn't exist until the night before. Your experiments directly determine what goes into humans. You might be a fit if: You're hardworking and the kind of person who loves taking on responsibility You pick up hard skills fast — things you've never done before, from scratch You're the person teams rely on when experiments need to be planned and executed You're the person a team puts in front of vendors, negotiations, and hard conversations Working together $100,000 - $150,000 per year, with room for upside and promotions as the company grows. Generous equity on a vesting schedule. Healthcare. Your Capable budget: $500+ per month to spend on training, supplements, and everything that you need to become your best self. The role offers a fast‑paced, high‑responsibility environment where you will quickly master advanced skills and contribute directly to breakthrough products. You'll work alongside the founding team—small, lean, moving fast. $10K referral bonus if we end up working together for 90+ days. #J-18808-Ljbffr