Scientist

Pilgrim • Redwood City, CA

25d

About The Position

As a Scientist at Pilgrim, you will develop and validate the biological workflows at the core of our products. You will move between hands-on bench work and system integration, designing experiments, troubleshooting failure modes, and refining protocols. Your work will span genomics, microbiology, and molecular assay development, and you will partner closely with engineers to translate scientific advances into integrated systems that perform reliably in the real world.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of biology, biochemistry, or a related life science, with a demonstrated ability to design, develop, and troubleshoot experiments.
• Hands-on experience developing nucleic acid-based assays and sample-preparation workflows.
• Advanced command of standard wet-lab equipment, instrumentation, and molecular biology techniques.
• Strong experimental judgment, attention to detail, and ability to interpret imperfect or conflicting data.

Nice To Haves

• An advanced degree (MS, PhD) is a plus, but not required.

Responsibilities

• Own the development and optimization of nucleic acid-based assays and sample-preparation workflows.
• Build and refine methods for lysis, nucleic acid extraction, purification, concentration, amplification, and sequencing preparation, maximizing recovery of low-abundance targets from complex environmental samples.
• Design and validate primer and probe sets for sensitive, specific target detection.
• Design and run experiments that expose failure modes and improve sensitivity, specificity, recovery, reproducibility, and limit of detection.
• Stress-test assays against real-world variation, including sample matrix, temperature, reagent age, contamination, and carryover.
• Translate manual bench protocols into automated workflows that run reliably on integrated hardware.
• Develop assays under appropriate design-control and quality practices, producing the documentation and traceability required for regulatory submissions, customer review, and audits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed