AI-bio - Member of Scientific Staff, Cell Culture and Functional Assays

London1w ago

In Office Staff EMEA Banking Genomics Staff Scientist Reporting Liquid

Requirements

• You are a hands-on cell biologist who takes assay variability personally. You have run the same assay often enough to tell a real effect from a bad plate, and you would rather find the cause than repeat the run. • The week has a rhythm in this job: cells to feed, plates to seed, runs to finish, numbers to return. You are happy with that, you keep records someone else can pick up, and you say early when something looks wrong rather than at the end of the week. • We do not hire people into boxes. The team is small, and early hires here end up owning work beyond the job they joined for. Nobody arrives with every part of this role. If you are strong in most of it and quick to learn the rest, we want to hear from you. • ◆ Strong hands-on mammalian cell culture: adherent and suspension lines, aseptic technique, and thawing, passaging and banking to a high and consistent standard. • ◆ Experience running cell-based assays end to end, including relevant controls, replicates and dose-response curves behind a reported number. • ◆ Comfort with plate-based work and the arithmetic that goes with it, such as dilution series, plate maps and normalisation. • ◆ Careful, traceable record-keeping that someone else can follow without asking you. • ◆ A PhD in cell biology, pharmacology, immunology or a related field, or an MSc and two to three years of relevant lab experience. • ◆ Reporter cell line bioassays for binding or blockade. • ◆ Receptor internalisation, lysosomal trafficking or cytotoxicity assays. • ◆ High-content or fluorescence imaging, and the image analysis behind it. • ◆ 384-well formats, liquid handlers or other plate-based automation. • ◆ Flow cytometry, for example for surface receptor quantification.

Responsibilities

• You will join the protein characterisation team and report to its lead. Day to day you will work with the scientist who designs the assay cascade, with the protein production and molecular characterisation scientists upstream of you, with the functional genomics team who share the cell culture suite, and with the engineers building the software and automation the lab runs on. • We are a small, elite team, and this is the first seat given entirely to the cell-based side of the work. • Our process has four stages. A short screening call about the role and the practicalities. A behavioural interview about how you work, run from the same template for every candidate, before anything technical. A technical stage with the protein characterisation team, built around real work rather than a puzzle, including time with us in person at the lab. Then references, aimed at whatever we still want to understand. • If you are not sure whether you match every line above, apply anyway. We would rather read it and decide.

Benefits

• Most cell-based assay roles sit inside a discovery project. You build an assay, you answer a question with it, and the assay goes quiet. This one is closer to running an instrument. The same assays run every week against a stream of new molecules, and the number that comes out is the product. • That changes what good looks like. Precision matters more than novelty, a protocol is only finished when someone else can run it and get your answer, and every passage, plate and reagent lot is captured as structured data, because a result is only as trustworthy as the cells behind it. • Some people find that energising; some find it outside their lane. Worth knowing in advance which one you are. • This is a lab-based role at our site in King's Cross, London. The cells are in the lab, so most of your week will be too, with room for writing and analysis away from the bench. The wider team is distributed and travels, so you will work with people who are not always in the building. • We work in the open. Decisions are written down, work happens centrally rather than scattered across tools, and the week opens with a session the whole company attends. There is a quarterly offsite. Each person owns their area and makes the call inside it, and we will expect that of you early rather than late. • UK benefits are 30 days of annual leave plus public holidays, a pension with a 10% employer contribution, and top-tier Bupa private health cover. More is added as the team grows.