Responsibilities

• Support Ginkgo’s mammalian cell engineering teams with your expertise in mammalian biology, providing the knowledge needed to design, screen and test novel cell lines, vectors and molecules designing megabases of DNA for each project.
• Analyze integrated internal and external data to advance mammalian cell engineering programs focused on RNA therapeutic tool development.
• Help maintain computational biology software owned by the Design Team.
• Troubleshoot moderate- to high-complexity technical problems, proposing biological design solutions in the dry lab, and maintaining familiarity with protocols (e.g. cell culture, diagnostic/QC, assay design, and execution) in the wet lab.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across Ginkgo to create the next generation of synthetic biology tools (e.g. algorithms, data structures, predictive models, software pipelines, and/or experimental approaches) that yield step changes in our ability to engineer mammalian cell lines.
• Maintain high-quality documentation of your work and discoveries, creating written reports, technical presentations for internal or external audiences, electronic lab notebooks, internal database records, code comments, and software documentation.

Desired Experience and Capabilities

• PhD (or equivalent experience) in computational biology, genomics, RNA biology, mRNA therapeutics, quantitative biology, or other relevant field. Interdisciplinary work is strongly preferred.
• Subject matter expertise in RNA molecular biology, mRNA expression systems or mRNA therapeutics development as evidenced by publication in journals or patents.
• 2+ years of professional experience (grad school counts) working with mammalian genome engineering tools, such as CRISPR/Cas systems, recombinases, and viral vectors. 
• Proficiency with at least one software programming language (Python preferred). Knowledge of best practices for collaborative software development (version control systems, test-driven development, and good documentation habits). Familiarity with cloud services (e.g. AWS) is preferred.
• First-hand technical experience in at least two of the following areas: synthetic biology, bioinformatics, RNA biology, structural RNA biology,  transcriptomics, translatomics, gene regulation, post transcriptional regulation, sequence analysis, genomics, NGS analysis, machine learning, and quantitative modeling of biological systems.
• Demonstrated ability to meet the demands of multiple concurrent projects.
• Strong curiosity about (and comfort working in) areas of biology previously unknown to you and, at times, your peers.