(Senior) Research Associate Biology, High Throughput Experimentation

Proteins are the molecular machines of life, used for many therapeutic, diagnostic, chemical, agricultural and food applications. Designing and optimizing proteins takes a lot of expert knowledge and manual effort, through the use of custom computational and biological tools.

Machine learning is revolutionising this space, by enabling high-fidelity protein models. At Cradle, we offer a software platform for AI-guided discovery and optimization of proteins, so that biologists can design proteins faster and at scale. We are already used by clients across pharma, biotech, agritech, foodtech, and academia.

We're an experienced team of over 40 people. We've built many successful products before and have enough funding for multiple years of runway. We are distributed across two main locations, Zurich and Amsterdam, and are focused on building the best possible team culture.

We offer our employees a very competitive salary, a generous equity stake (for full time employees) in the company and a wide range of benefits and career progression opportunities.

For this, we are looking for a motivated Research Associate to strengthen our Bioengineering team. This team is responsible for developing and running high-throughput workflows for building DNA libraries, expressing and purifying proteins, and running characterisation studies (e.g. enzyme activity or binding assays). We’ve built a wet-lab infrastructure with a lot of high-throughput automation, enabling much more scalable and cost-effective experimentation, working hand in hand with our machine learning algorithms. Next to more established methods, we’re also developing workflows that are based on fundamentally different techniques than currently is mainstream.

As a Research Associate, you'll join a diverse team of researchers to collaboratively execute and continuously improve novel wet lab methods for our DNA construction and protein optimisation pipeline. If you enjoy running molecular biology workflows, love to tinker, and want to be a part of building the next-generation platform for making biotechnological products - please apply!

As a Research Associate in the Bioengineering team, you will:

• Run workflows for (library) DNA synthesis and assembly, protein expression, protein purification, and protein characterisation.

• Suggest and work on improvements to make these workflows more efficient, robust, cost-effective, and integrated.

• Effectively communicate results, successes, and challenges in a cross-functional environment.

• BSc + 2 yrs, MSc, or equivalent experience in molecular biology, biochemistry, enzymology, metabolic engineering, biophysics, or related fields.

• Demonstrated experience with in vitro and/or in vivo protein expression systems (e.g. E. coli, B. subtilis, P. pastoris, CHO or HEK cell lines, cell extracts).

• Hands-on experience with standard cloning techniques.

• Excitement to learn, contribute, and drive innovation in an early stage startup environment. Having an appetite for its ambiguity and fast pace.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills in English. Proactively sharing results, successes and challenges in a cross-functional environment.

• Ability to run multiple projects simultaneously while ensuring that process steps are documented, and physical/digital data are organized.

Experience with one or more of the following would be an advantage:

• Protein purification techniques (e.g. affinity tag purification).

• Assay development for enzymatic activity or antibody binding assays.

• Protein expression in cell-free systems (cell extracts, myTXTL, PURE).

• Next-generation sequencing techniques (Illumina, Nanopore, PacBio).

• Classical high-throughput laboratory automation (robotic liquid handlers, plate readers).

• High-throughput advanced cloning technologies, such as site-directed mutagenesis, Gibson Assembly, and Golden-Gate Cloning.

• Pooled or multiplexed methodologies for DNA assembly, strain build, or enzymatic assays.

• Familiarity with scripting languages such as Python, Matlab, R, SQL.

Learning more about the BioEngineering team

We're quite open about what we work on in our BioEngineering team. If you'd like to learn a bit more before applying, check out blog posts from our team (link 1, link 2) or watch the webinar we did with Benchling (link).

Did we pique your interest? We'd love to hear from you. Please use this form to apply directly.

Please note that for roles in Zurich and in the USA, we currently can only consider candidates who have, or are able to independently obtain, a local work authorisation.

A notice about recruitment scams: Please be aware that scammers are posing as us in order to get your personal details or money. We only communicate via @cradle.bio email addresses, we only make job offers after having met you in person at our office in Zurich or Amsterdam, and we never ask you to pay for anything during the interview process