About this Senior Research Associate or Scientist 1 (Polytope Bio) role at Astera Institute
About Astera:
Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward an abundant future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to dramatically accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive scientific progress.
Unlike traditional non-profit research organizations, projects supported by Astera operate like high-velocity startups, allowing us to focus on ambitious goals, match structure to problem, and attract strong technical talent and leadership. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming here.
Position Summary
Today's frontier biological AI models are trained almost entirely on static, pre-existing data. They are powerful pattern matchers, but lack feedback from real biology.
Polytope Bio is a residency project at Astera that is building the missing piece: a post-training engine that closes the loop between frontier AI models and high-throughput biology. Our work will power new applications in generative biology by aligning frontier AI models directly to experimental measurements of what actually folds, binds, and functions.
We are looking for a Senior Research Associate or Scientist 1 to join our experimental biology team and help build and operate the high-throughput experimental platform at the heart of Polytope Bio. You will design and execute experiments focused on high-throughput cloning and strain engineering, develop and optimize workflows for DNA assembly, library construction, and screening assays, analyze experimental data, and work closely with computational researchers to translate biological measurements into high-quality datasets that can directly improve AI models.
This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of experimental biology and frontier AI in a highly collaborative, fast-moving research environment. Your work will help shape the technical direction of a new research platform from the ground up.
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.
Strong Pluses
Familiarity with biological research (protein modeling, sequence models, structural biology, or adjacent areas).
Experience building and scaling training infrastructure on large GPU clusters.
Past team management and technical leadership experience.
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.
