Scientist - Strain Development

In this position, you will play a key role in our strain and metabolic engineering efforts. You will engineer the cells that we use as the chassis organisms in our cell-free synthesis platform. Your work will be at the forefront of cell-free protein synthesis research as we engineer strains to produce complex proteins at high titers.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and troubleshoot bacterial strain engineering techniques.
• Design and construct microbial strains to optimize production of proteins in cell-free based on understanding of cell metabolism, review of relevant literature, and collaboration with scientific leadership.
• Collaborate with our synthetic biology, fermentation, purification, and regulatory teams to design, plan and execute demanding strain engineering and screening campaigns that produce strains to meet bioprocess needs and GMP requirements.
• Test the performance of the engineered strains using growth, metabolic, and productivity assays including fermentation, HPLC, ELISA, SDS-PAGE, Western Blotting, etc.

• Design and implement screening or selection methods to quickly validate new constructs.
• Utilize bioinformatics DNA sequence analyses to design and validate successfully engineered strains.

• Interpret and present experimental data to scientific, engineering, and leadership teams.

Qualifications

• [Required] BS ( 6 years experience), related MS ( 4 years experience) or PhD ( 1 years experience) in Bioengineering, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Chemical Engineering, Molecular biology, or other related fields.
• [Required] Expertise in bacterial engineering by single/double recombination, recombinase-based methods, or nuclease-based methods. Direct experience with both recombination and CRISPR/Cas9-based engineering methods preferred.
• [Required] Hands-on experience constructing and screening engineered bacterial strains for improved protein production
• [Required] Strong background in molecular biology, protein expression, and synthetic biology
• [Required] Direct experience in microbial fermentation, preferably for protein production.
• [Preferred] Experience in establishing high throughput screening and selection platforms for engineered strains with the desired phenotypes.
• [Preferred] Deep understanding of bacterial physiology, metabolic engineering, gene expression and gene regulation.
• [Preferred] Experience in implementing and improving automation and high throughput platforms to increase experimental throughput.
• [Preferred] Expertise in regulatory compliance.
• [Preferred] Experience in protein and metabolic analytics including HPLC, ELISA, SDS-PAGE, LC-MS, Western Blotting, etc.
• [Preferred] Experience in bioprocessing research and development for a protein therapeutic or vaccine process under GMP requirements
• Ability to work in a fast-paced small company environment with a drive to creatively solve problems around how to speed up process development, optimization, and operation.
• Strong technical, organizational, and communication skills
• Availability to work full-time hours at our Oakland, CA location.