Here's the tl;dr:

• We are on a mission to make programming biology easy. We provide biologists with the software, machine learning & services to discover, design and optimise enzymes and their cell-factories to ultimately produce almost anything.

• We're an experienced team. We have built many successful products before and we have raised enough funds to have plenty of runway for the years to come!

• We're focused on building the best possible team culture. We're distributed across two locations, and are flexible about when and where we work.

• We offer top of the market salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits from health and wellbeing, financial, to training and career progression opportunities.

This is Cradle

Cradle helps teams to engineer proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. We are bridge builders who bring together the best of machine learning, synthetic biology, developer tools, and user experience design. Our mission is to enable a world where most of the products around us can be easily made and degraded biologically using a cell-factory instead of (petro-)chemicals, plants or animal agriculture.

What we're looking for

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 that enables 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!

Responsibilities

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.

Need-to-Haves

• 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.

Nice-to-haves

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 recently did with Benchling (link).

Cradle helps biologists design improved proteins in record time using powerful prediction algorithms and AI design suggestions.

We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. Our mission is to ultimately help more people build with biology and replacing traditional farms and factories for a more sustainable world.

You will be joining a high-growth, highly ambitious startup with an experienced founding team, whose motivation is building a more sustainable world using biology. We are backed by some of the most well known investors and industry veterans. Joining us now means you will be getting in on the ground floor; you will have a significant impact on how we shape the company, and success will mean an outsized reward.

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