Industry R&D
Scientist, Assay Development (Contractor)
Recursion
Salt Lake City, UT
Description
Your work will change lives. Including your own.
The Impact You'll Make
- Contribute directly to Recursion's mission of revolutionizing drug discovery through our automation- and AI-powered platform.
- Develop, optimize, and validate cell-based and biochemical assays for deployment on our automated high-throughput screening platforms, enabling the construction of Recursion's Maps of Biology across diverse and often challenging human cell types.
- Execute assay workflows at scale, monitoring performance against defined quality metrics and flagging deviations early.
- Analyze experimental data rigorously to validate processes, troubleshoot systems, and drive improvement, sharing findings and collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team to refine approach and direction.
- Document methods, results, and protocols to a standard that allows workflows to be transferred and run reliably by others.
- Conduct impactful work in a matrixed environment where your insights and ideas are valued and expected.
The Team You'll Join
You will join a cross-functional assay development team working to redefine preclinical drug discovery. The environment thrives on collaboration, open communication, and teamwork across multiple departments. You will work closely with biologists, assay development associates, data scientists, software engineers, automation engineers, and our supply chain team. The team's key output is robust, transferable assays for deployment on a high-throughput screening platform that integrates industry-leading automation to generate petabytes of high-dimensional data from human cells.
Strong communication skills are essential to our success, as much of our coordination and reporting happens electronically. We value independent thought, self-reflection, and a growth mindset, with a shared goal of continuous improvement. We also believe the best ideas come from diverse perspectives, so if you have suggestions to improve the way we work, we welcome them.
The Experience You'll Need
- B.S. or M.Sc. in Biology, Biochemistry, Cell Biology, or a related field with 3+ years of relevant industry or equivalent laboratory experience.
- Hands-on experience developing and optimizing cell-based or biochemical assays, including mammalian cell culture and aseptic technique.
- Working knowledge of core molecular and cell biology techniques, such as transfection, nucleic acid and protein handling, and plate-based readouts.
- Experience with automated, computer-controlled laboratory instrumentation such as liquid handlers, plate readers, and imagers, in 384 and 1536-well formats.
- Demonstrated ability to move experimental work forward independently and efficiently with general direction rather than step-by-step instruction.
- Demonstrated ability to adapt and quickly learn new techniques and instrumentation.
- Careful, consistent documentation of protocols and results in an electronic lab notebook or equivalent.
- A passion for working in a fast-paced environment where you'll apply creativity and independent thinking to assay development for early-stage drug discovery.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with assay qualification concepts and statistical quality metrics, such as Z', signal-to-background, CV, and dose-response fitting.
- Comfort with computational tools for data analysis in Python, R, or equivalent.
- Experience with genetic perturbation approaches such as CRISPR or RNAi, or with omics readouts such as transcriptomics or proteomics.
- Experience working with primary or iPSC-derived cell models.
**This is a 9-month contractor role with working hours from 9:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday**
The Values We Hope You Share:
- We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
- We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
- We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
- We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
- We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
- We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.
Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.
More About Recursion
Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives. Recursion is advancing a portfolio of differentiated investigational medicines across its wholly owned and partnered pipeline in oncology, rare disease, neuroscience, immunology, and other therapeutic areas with significant unmet need. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, an AI-native, end-to-end drug discovery and development platform integrating biology, chemistry, and clinical development into a unified intelligence system. Powered by proprietary multimodal data, purpose-built AI models, and bilingual teams fluent in both science and AI, the Recursion OS is designed to translate complex science into medicines that matter — faster, better, and at scale — for patients who are waiting.
Recursion’s platform infrastructure is anchored in Salt Lake City, Utah and Milton Park, Oxfordshire, where its automated biology and chemistry laboratories generate proprietary data at industrial scale. Recursion also maintains offices in New York, Montréal, and London, three global hubs for talent and leadership at the intersection of AI and scientific innovation. Learn more at www.recursion.com, or connect on X and LinkedIn.
Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.
Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.