Principal Computational Biologist

About BullFrog AI

BullFrog AI (NASDAQ: BFRG) is a computational biology company spun out of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. We sit at the intersection of AI and drug discovery, building platforms that help pharmaceutical and biotech companies make better, faster decisions across the drug development lifecycle:

• bfPREP™ — biology-aware data harmonization that unlocks the value trapped in fragmented, multi-site clinical and omics datasets
• bfLEAP™ — causal AI analytics for patient subgroup discovery, biomarker identification, and drug target prioritization
• bfARENAS™ — structured multi-criteria decision support for high-stakes portfolio, indication, and go/no-go decisions

The Role

BullFrog AI is seeking a Principal Computational Biologist to lead the science of the functional-ranking system inside bfARENAS. The ranking machinery already exists: give it a plain-language label such as relevance to dopaminergic tone, a specific diabetes symptom, or inflammasome abundance and activation, and it orders all human proteins against that label. Making sure a label is well-posed, that a ranking means something specific, and that the answer is right, is yours. The system is early and experimental; building the evidence behind these rankings so they stand up to outside scrutiny is the part you would own. This is a senior individual contributor role, and for now a solo one.

What You'll Do

Evidence and Validation

• Own the evidence that establishes a ranking is right, especially where there is no clean answer key
• Decide what each ranking gets compared against: known gene sets, genetic and perturbation evidence, curated associations, orthogonal data, and expert-chosen positives and negatives
• Build the benchmarks and comparisons that back a ranking, and set the bar it must clear before it goes out

What We Rank, and On What Grounds

• Bring the scientific grounding to label design (a shared effort with commercial and product teams): what a label like dopaminergic tone or inflammasome activation should mean, and whether the system can answer it well
• Turn a loosely worded concept into a precise, answerable question
• Say early when a proposed label is ill-posed or likely to produce a confident wrong list, before compute is spent generating it

Make Rankings Defensible

• Make sure any ranking that leaves the building can be defended to a scientist who did not produce it
• Support commercial and product teams as they weigh which labels to invest in, and help judge where limited compute is best spent

What We're Looking For

Education

• PhD in computational biology, bioinformatics, genetics, systems biology, or a closely related quantitative field

Experience

• 5+ years in a relevant field, with a real track record of designing evaluations for problems that have no clean gold standard
• Deep enough in functional genomics or disease biology to tell whether a ranked list of proteins is plausible, with breadth across areas
• Able to turn a biological concept that resists a tidy definition into something you can measure and defend
• You have run enrichment analyses and GSEA in earnest and come away unconvinced, because the annotations feeding them are the largest source of nonsense in the output
• Fluent enough in Python to take the system's output apart, build your own checks, and find where it breaks
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States

Desired Skills

• Familiarity with target-disease association resources such as Open Targets, and a view on where they fall short
• Deep familiarity with curated gene sets, genetic evidence, perturbation screens, and expression atlases
• An understanding of how language-model scoring goes wrong
• A publication record in functional genomics, target discovery, or disease biology
• Familiarity with disease and phenotype ontologies

What We Offer

Competitive base compensation with eligibility for performance bonus and stock options. Full benefits from day one including medical, dental, and vision, short-term disability, and 401(k) enrollment, 15 days PTO plus 11 paid holidays annually, and maternity and paternity leave. Salary: $175,000 - $220,000 annually.