Senior Scientist, Structural Data Representation

Astera Institute • Emerybille, CA

6d • Onsite

About The Position

Prism, part of Astera’s Life Sciences Division, is building open, usable tools, methods, and infrastructure to study protein dynamics from experimental data and apply them to biological questions. Astera is a private foundation supporting high-impact science and technology through grants, investments, and in-house research programs. Radial, Astera’s life sciences division, tackles foundational problems in biology while developing new ways to fund, organize, and share research.

Prism seeks a full-time Senior Scientist, Structural Data Representation to lead how its conformational ensemble models are encoded, organized in databases, and connected to tools used across the field, including visualization, machine learning models, and computational pipelines. The position leads a small team and works with external developer communities to make ensemble data a standard part of structural biology. The role reports to the Scientific Program Director and is on-site in Emeryville, California. Some travel (10%) is required for in-person collaboration and presentations; relocation packages will be considered.

Requirements

• PhD in a relevant area.
• At least 4 years of work experience.
• Experience managing a team of scientists or engineers.
• Deep understanding of how structural models are encoded and used for interpretation, including fluency in mmCIF and its extension mechanisms.
• Strong coding experience and a track record of writing software that other people use.
• Ability to communicate clearly across technical communities, explain data standards to structural biologists, machine-learning researchers, and software developers, and build agreement among them.
• An execution-forward approach: ship working versions, gather feedback, and iterate.
• Cultural alignment with the organization’s stated principles, including problem-solving, flexibility, bias to action, high standards, openness to feedback, integrity, judgment, stewardship, and embracing modern work tools.

Nice To Haves

• Product development experience.
• Experience building scientific databases or visualization tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of 2–3 scientists and software engineers, set priorities, and keep execution moving as Prism’s ensemble models advance from internal research to broad adoption.
• Work with the Scientific Program Director to determine strategy and prioritize approaches and science within the team.
• Partner with Prism’s modeling and ensemble-functional team and the Scientific Program Director to ensure cohesion across the project, including aligning data representation choices with model outputs and downstream functional analyses.
• Design, test, and deploy encoding models and schemas for conformational ensembles.
• Direct development of databases that connect dynamic ensemble models for data sharing and downstream use, including visualization tools.
• Work with external partners such as the PDB and developers in visualization, machine learning, and computational chemistry to build connections between Prism’s work and external efforts.
• Partner with teams behind widely used open-source structural biology tools to define and implement native support for ensemble models.

Benefits

• Top-tier health insurance plans with 99% of premiums covered by Astera Institute for employees and dependents.
• Daily lunch, plus a well-stocked fridge and pantry.
• Licenses for frontier AI tools and software.
• 403(b) retirement plans.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Paid parental leave.
• Commuter benefits.
• Health and dependent care flexible spending accounts.
• Visa sponsorship.

What This Job Offers

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