Senior Protein Scientist

Your work will change lives. Including your own. 

The Impact You’ll Make

As Senior Protein Scientist, you will be instrumental in driving the success of Recursion’s pipeline by managing CRO partnerships for protein production. You’ll be responsible for ensuring excellence in recombinant protein design, expression, purification, and QC to assist critical discovery projects from early stages through Lead Optimisation. Working with a fellow Senior Protein Scientist and reporting to the Associate Director, Protein Science, you will collaborate closely with Recursion’s discovery teams and external partners, ensuring the delivery of high-quality protein reagents.

In this role, you will:

• Act as a contact and expert in protein production outsourcing (design, expression, purification, QC, biophysics) to support in vitro assays and structural biology.
• Collaborate with internal teams (mainly Structural Biology, Primary Pharmacology, Project Biology, Procurement), Protein Science, and CROs to optimize strategies for challenging protein targets and guide the CRO approach.
• Build strong relationships with project leads and stakeholders to manage expectations and drive project impact.
• Assist in the delivery of concise reports to summarise the current CRO portfolio status and immediate priorities to relevant stakeholders from your team.
• Build continuous improvement activities and data capture in the team. Apply problem solving skills to identify workflow efficiencies and implement solutions to enhance processes and share learnings/changes to stakeholders. 
• Support experimental teams at Milton Park for biophysical characterization of target proteins if required.

The Team You’ll Join 

Success in this role will depend on your ability to foster strong, collaborative relationships both internally and externally. You will be part of a small team and your skills in effective communication and co-enabling a positive, high performance environment will be crucial in driving project success and continuous process improvement.  

The Experience You’ll Need

Essential technical competencies and educational requirements:

• PhD/DPhil in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology or a related science. Alternatively, MSc/BSc in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology or a related science plus an additional 2+ years of lab-based, practical experience.
• 3+ years of experience in an industrial Protein Sciences environment.
• Proven experience in designing constructs and protein engineering for recombinant protein production for use in downstream applications (structural studies, biophysical characterisation, and assay development).
• Proven experience and troubleshooting in cell culturing techniques and expression of recombinant proteins (high-throughput, small and large scale) including bacterial (E. coli), insect (Baculovirus) and Mammalian (HEK & CHO, transient and stable) expression systems.
• Proven experience and troubleshooting in the purification and QC (high-throughput, small and large scale) of a variety of recombinant proteins including affinity, ion exchange and size exclusion chromatography, SDS-PAGE and Western blotting, spectroscopy and the use of FPLC (ÄKTA systems).
• Ability to use protein analysis techniques to study and optimize recombinant proteins (Mass spectrometry, DLS, Thermal shift assays, aSEC/FSEC).
• Demonstrable analytical approach to problem solving, with an adaptability to work across multiple projects.

Desirable technical competencies:

• Proven experience working successfully with CRO partners.
• Experience in successfully optimising expression and purification of membrane protein targets for structural studies/assay development.

Working Location:

This position is based at our office located in Oxford. This would initially be at the Schrodinger site (Oxford) but would eventually transition in 2025 to the Milton Park site (Abingdon). Please note that we utilize a hybrid working environment and ask that employees spend at least 50% of their time in the office.

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The Values That We Hope You Share:

• We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
• We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
• We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover. 
• Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
• We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.

Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work. You can read more about our values and how we live them every day here.

More About Recursion 

Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in London, Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer that values diversity and inclusion.  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. 

Recursion welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.