Senior Research Associate or Scientist 1 (Polytope Bio)

Responsibilities

• Design and execute experiments: Plan and conduct molecular biology and microbial engineering experiments to generate high-quality, reproducible measurements at ambitious levels of throughput, speed, and cost efficiency.
• Develop and optimize assays: Build, troubleshoot, and improve biological assays, and workflows, with a focus on increasing throughput, reducing variability, and generating measurements that are useful for model training.
• Own research projects: Take ownership of experimental projects from experimental design through execution, analysis, interpretation, and documentation.
• Analyze and interpret data: Work with experimental and computational datasets to identify trends, troubleshoot unexpected results, and inform subsequent rounds of experimentation.
• Build experimental infrastructure: Help establish robust laboratory protocols, workflows, documentation, and quality-control systems that enable rapid iteration and scaling.
• Laboratory operations: Maintain laboratory equipment, reagents, and workflows and contribute to a well-organized, safe, and highly productive research environment.
• Open science: Contribute to making methods, datasets, and physical artifacts openly available to the research community following Astera's open science guidelines.

Qualifications And Experience

• Research experience: Bachelor's or Master's degree in molecular biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, or a related field, with significant hands-on research experience, including at least 3 years of industry experience. PhD holders are also welcome to apply.
• Microbial engineering: Hands-on experience engineering yeast or other microbes, including strain construction, genetic engineering, and characterization of strains.
• Molecular biology expertise: Strong hands-on experience with molecular biology techniques, including primer design, Golden Gate cloning, DNA assembly, plasmid construction, and library generation, with a demonstrated ability to independently execute and troubleshoot experiments.
• Scientific rigor: Strong attention to experimental design, controls, reproducibility, quantitative measurement, and rigorous documentation.
• Ownership: Ability to take an experimental question from a loosely defined objective through experimental design, execution, analysis, and iteration.
• Problem solving: Resourcefulness and persistence when experiments do not work as expected. You enjoy diagnosing failures and developing creative solutions.
• Builder mindset: Excitement about building new experimental capabilities, workflows, and infrastructure rather than simply operating established protocols.
• Collaboration: Ability to work effectively with both experimental biologists and computational/AI researchers and communicate scientific results clearly.
• Entrepreneurial spirit: Comfort operating with ambiguity, moving quickly, and taking on responsibilities outside a narrowly defined job description.

Location

This position will be on-site at our lab space in Emeryville, CA.

What we offer

• Compensation: Base salary of $90,000 to $120,000 during the residency.
• Upside: The potential for a founding research role in a future spinout, contingent on project success and mutual fit.
• Scientific Impact: Authorship of high-impact open-source datasets, methods, and models
• Unique Environment: A rare combination of frontier ML work directly coupled to a purpose-built, high-throughput experimental engine.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Full benefits package including health insurance, a company-sponsored retirement plan, vision, dental, daily lunch and more.

Benefits Summary

Compensation Range: $90K - $120K