Research Platform Scientist

Merge Labs • San Francisco, CA

18h

About The Position

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use. About the team Merge is tackling some of the most audacious problems in molecular engineering, synthetic biology and neuroscience. Our Research Platform Team builds the experimental capabilities needed to solve these problems with very high speed and rigor. The instruments and pipelines the team builds accelerate molecular assembly, protein expression, mammalian cell culture, advanced microscopy, sequencing, as well as some very unusual custom methods. The team collaborates with program teams to establish and streamline these capabilities, automate wherever it makes sense to do so, and integrate with our data science and machine learning pipelines. We come up with creative approaches to greatly increase throughput and continuously innovate. About the role As a Platform Scientist, you will build high-efficiency and high-throughput experimental pipelines to enable research programs to move as quickly as possible. You will collaborate closely with program leads, project scientists, data scientists and engineers. You will lead and perform work as an individual and recruit additional team members as needed.

Requirements

• Have a PhD in molecular biology, bioengineering, biophysics or similar field, or have equivalent experience leading research projects end-to-end.
• Have developed high throughput experimental pipelines involving molecular assembly, cell culture, next-generation sequencing and/or protein engineering.
• Love getting your hands dirty with equipment setup, code writing, biological experiments and data analysis as needed.
• Love learning new science and developing new capabilities.
• Have high agency to initiate and drive efforts, constantly ideate and look to make improvements.
• Have strong communication skills and enjoy collaborating with researchers to help them accelerate their projects.
• Have come up with creative or unexpected solutions to tricky problems.

Nice To Haves

• Have worked in a fast-paced biotech/techbio, ideally startup, environment and loved it.

Responsibilities

• Partner with program leads and scientists to understand key experimental needs and workflows.
• Establish processes to enable high-throughput and/or high-efficiency experiments, including reagent production and readouts.
• Scope, acquire, build, program and validate instruments to support experimental workflows.
• Own the quality, reliability, and integrity of data produced by automated pipelines, including defining and integrating appropriate QC checkpoints.
• Collaborate with data science/ML engineers to integrate metadata tracking, computational design, and analysis into experimental pipelines.
• Collaborate with electrical, mechanical and software engineers to build custom setups.
• Conceive, design and validate ideas for how to increase experimental throughput.
• Serve as an integral member of the scientific team and contribute your insights to project design, execution and analysis.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree