Who are we looking for:
We’re looking for a part-time Research Assistant (approximately 20 hours per week, contract) to join Medra on a special project in partnership with one of our customers. In this role, you’ll be hands-on in the lab—running experiments, refining protocols, and helping push the boundaries of our platform. If you’re excited to contribute to an ambitious, high-impact initiative at the intersection of biology, robotics, and AI, we’d love to meet you.
What We're Building:
At Medra, our mission is to use AI, robotics, and biology to accelerate life science research, with the ultimate goal of eradicating disease. We are building an Embodied Lab AI platform that helps scientists scale their lab work and generate orders of magnitude more data than before, whether to bring a new life-saving drug to the clinic or to train a ground-breaking biology foundation model.This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.
The Team:
- We’re a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers. We’re collaborative and love moving fast, both with our product and on team trips skiing or go-karting!
- As a team, we love nerding out about engineering and robotics — plus other topics like race cars or cooking. We like learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other.
- Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don’t mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.
What You’ll Do
- Perform and refine cell culture workflows, including nucleic acid delivery methods (e.g., transfection), both manually and using Medra’s platform.
- Conduct experiments to assess and improve protocol consistency and performance.
- Support additional laboratory procedures such as protein characterization (e.g., SDS-PAGE, Western blotting).
- Maintain meticulous records of experimental procedures, observations, and outcomes to ensure reproducibility and data integrity.
- Assist in developing and updating standard operating procedures
What We’re Looking For
- Bachelor’s degree in biology, biochemistry, or a related field.
- Minimum of 3 years of hands-on laboratory experience in an academic or industry setting.
- Proficiency in cell culture techniques, with specific experience in nucleic acid delivery methods (e.g., transfection),
- Familiarity with flow cytometry, and imaging assays.
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.
- Ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, interdisciplinary environment.
- Proficient with using AI tools to make manual workflows more efficient (e.g. using ChatGPT as a co-writer to help flesh out a protocol)
- Familiarity with data analysis tools and software commonly used in biological research.
- Willingness to learn and adapt to new technologies.
- Prior involvement in protocol development or optimization projects.
Bonus Points
This position is 100% in-person with local travel to client sites, you must be able to come on-site to our San Francisco office.
