Description review

Foray Bioscience | Software Engineer, Data & ML | On-Site (Cambridge, MA) | Full Time | $105,000–$130,000 + equity

Foray Bioscience · On-Site (Cambridge, MA) · back to the listing

HR standards

58/100

needs work

Title ↔ description

77/100

solid

Reads as

Unclear

no confident match

What this role officially is

software developer — ESCO, the EU occupation classification

Software developers implement or program all kinds of software systems based on specifications and designs by using programming languages, tools, and platforms.

Also known as: application developer, application programmer, solutions developer, programmer, software specialist, application software developer

How others title the same work

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What the listing never says

  • No section describes what the person would actually do. Scope clarity
  • No pay range published. Candidates cannot tell whether applying is worth their time. Pay transparency
  • No location or timezone policy stated, so a candidate cannot tell where they may work from. Scope clarity

The listing, marked up

Nothing in the wording of this listing tripped a check. The scores above still judge how complete and coherent it is.

Company:
Foray is a plant production company using plant cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced biomanufacturing to grow materials, molecules, and seeds directly from the cell up.
Our work is powered by Pando, our intelligent workspace for plant science. Pando combines novel plant datasets and emerging predictive models to help researchers design and optimize plant production workflows with greater speed and reliability. Together, our software and biomanufacturing platforms are creating new ways to produce what we need from plants while building more resilient plant industries.
Role:
We’re looking for a Software Engineer, Data & ML to help build the software and data foundation behind Pando. You’ll work across the product, with a particular focus on backend systems, APIs, data infrastructure, and the systems supporting our machine learning work. A major part of the role is figuring out how to turn complex scientific and experimental information — including scientific literature, natural language, and data generated in the lab — into reliable, structured data.
You’ll work closely with software engineers, biologists, and ML researchers to translate experimental workflows, statistical analyses, and design-of-experiment approaches into scalable software and predictive tools. You’ll join early, have significant ownership, and help make foundational technical and architectural decisions as the platform grows.
You:
+ Strong software engineering generalist with particular depth in backend and data systems
+ Experience shipping production-grade software and building backend systems, data pipelines, databases, APIs, or other data-intensive infrastructure
+ Strong in Python and comfortable with relational databases, APIs, and modern software systems
+ Familiar with MLOps and the infrastructure needed to run AI models in production
+ Comfortable turning messy, heterogeneous, or unstructured information into trustworthy data, including through NLP, information extraction, or similar techniques
+ Understand good scientific data practices including quality, provenance, versioning, reproducibility, permissions, and access controls
+ Enough statistical fluency to reason about experimental data, uncertainty, and design of experiments
+ Enjoy learning unfamiliar domains, working across disciplines, and solving ambiguous problems with significant ownership
+ Experience with scientific or biological data, ML infrastructure, predictive modeling, optimization, or AI applications is helpful, but we don’t expect one person to have done all of these things before
+ Must be authorized to work in the United States
Learn more & apply: https://jobs.polymer.co/foray-bioscience/41044?source=Hacker%20News
Referrals: Available in the form of a houseplant or a lab-grown Christmas tree, while supplies last!

How this was produced

Highlights are found by rule, not by a model: each one is a phrase matched at a known position, and every note is a template we wrote. The two scores come from a typed-decision model (Jev) that reads the listing against the official role definition and real listings for the same role, and returns probabilities rather than prose — it never writes any of the words on this page, and never chooses what to highlight.

Deterministic penalty applied to the HR score: 16 points (from 74 before penalties). Reviewed 21 Sep 2026.