Xaira Therapeutics
AI-native drug discovery — generative protein design and foundation models for biology
About Xaira Therapeutics
Funding & Growth
✓ Pros
- • Launched with $1B+ — exceptional runway for an early-stage company
- • Frontier generative-AI work in protein/antibody design and biological foundation models
- • Leadership drawn from Genentech, the Institute for Protein Design, and Meta AI
- • Bay Area HQ with additional Seattle and London teams
✗ Cons
- • Early-stage company (founded 2024) — platform and roles still maturing
- • Most roles are onsite in South San Francisco
- • High research bar; many roles target PhD-level or 5+ years of industry experience
🏢 Working Here
Xaira Therapeutics launched in April 2024 with more than $1 billion in committed funding — one of the largest initial raises in biotech — incubated by ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs.
Led by co-founder, Chairman & CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne (former Genentech chief scientific officer and former president of Stanford and Rockefeller universities), the company is building predictive and agentic AI across the full arc of drug discovery and development: generative models to design protein and antibody therapeutics against historically hard-to-drug targets, plus foundation models for biology and disease to improve target identification and patient stratification.
Xaira is headquartered at 700 Gateway Blvd in South San Francisco, with additional teams in Seattle and London.
Computational and ML staff work closely with experimental biologists and drug-discovery teams to take models from data to deployed systems.
🧬 Bioinformatics Focus
Xaira's computational work spans the full ML-for-biology stack:
- Generative protein and antibody design;
- Foundation models for biology and disease over large - scale single-cell and perturb-seq data;
- Multimodal representation and generative modeling across imaging and omics;
- Agentic AI systems that reason over biomedical literature, omics datasets, and clinical records; and
- Production ML and research engineering to deploy these models into discovery workflows. Core tooling is Python with modern deep-learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX) and large-scale model training.
📈 Career Growth & Development
Career Tracks
Openings range from an AI-in-Residence program (an industry alternative to a postdoc, 6–12 months) to senior AI Scientist and Research Engineer tracks, with mentorship from leaders drawn from Genentech, Meta AI, and the Institute for Protein Design.
Publications
Scientific contribution is encouraged, including publications and conference presentations where appropriate.
Overview
As a well-funded early-stage company, Xaira offers broad ownership and the chance to take ML systems end-to-end — from problem framing and prototyping through validation and deployment.