Research Associate - MOAD Returnship

Your work will change lives. Including your own. 

We are leveraging new technology to create virtuous cycles of learning around datasets to build a next-generation biopharmaceutical company. It’s complex biology, decoded. 

Recursion is a digital biology company industrializing drug discovery. We are working to solve some of the hardest, most meaningful problems facing human health today. Come join us in our mission to decode biology to radically improve lives, while doing the most impactful work of your life.

Recursion’s Returnship Program

Our Returnship program is sponsored by the Women at Recursion Employee Resource Group. The program is aimed at helping those who have taken a hiatus (2+ years) from the STEM industry have the opportunity to return to the workforce in a learning environment with support from teams and mentors. This allows our company to tap into an underutilized pool of talent in Utah, and  leverage the experience and skills of previous work and life experiences, while also providing opportunity to learn and develop experience in new cutting-edge tools and technology. This sixteen-week program will enable you to have ownership of projects that can deeply impact the company’s mission to radically decode biology and serve patients, while having the guidance, support and mentorship has you re-enter the workforce. Each Returner will be assigned a mentor who will meet with them weekly, as well as weekly seminars on workplace culture, communication and technology.

Our returner program lasts 4 months, running from February 2026 through the end of May 2026, with potential for transition into full-time employment depending on performance and availability. This position is mainly based in our Salt Lake City, UT headquarters, with some hybrid working flexibility available.

MOAD Returnship

Are you a talented scientific professional looking to re-enter the workforce after a career break? The Multi-Omics Assay Development (MOAD) team is excited to announce our MOAD Research Associate Returnship. This unique opportunity is designed for individuals with a passion for cutting-edge biological research and a desire to contribute to groundbreaking scientific and innovative projects.

The MOAD team is a group of Scientists that work together to develop novel assays and onboard them to the HTS platform. This team interacts with many cross functional teams including a group of exceptional biologists, automation and software engineers, assay operations, machine learning scientists, computational biologists, and data scientists. We work rapidly and as a team on a project-by-project basis to prove or disprove the value and feasibility of new biological assays as Scientist and Project Managers. 

As a Research Associate, you will work under the direction of a Senior Scientist, collaborating closely with our MOAD team and crossfunctional teams. We are seeking an individual with excellent time management skills, a bias for action, strong troubleshooting abilities, and a minimal viable product mindset. A strong desire to learn new skills, techniques, and industry approaches is essential to thrive in our fast-paced environment.

Working alongside Recursion’s MOAD within the OS Hub. You will work on projects to: 

• Perform tissue culture activities: This includes media preparation, cell thawing, counting, lipofection, plating, and changing media, utilizing good sterile laboratory techniques.
• Execute drug treatment experiments on cells, leveraging lab automation tools.
• Conduct diverse experiments: Including but not limited to immunofluorescence, high-content imaging, and other relevant assays (e.g., -omics assays).
• Capture data via automated imaging runs and set up basic image analyses.
• Document project activities using an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) and interact with a laboratory information system (LIMS) for reagent tracking, SOPs, and QC.
• Deliver robust data and establish baseline protocols to drive progress on complicated and exciting scientific projects.
• Learn about assay development, including experiment design and validation.

The Experience You’ll Need

• Must have 3 years of working experience in a research laboratory, preferably with mammalian cell culture.
• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Biology, Biochemistry, Bioengineering, or a related major. Including understanding of molecular biology techniques. 
• Must have taken a 2+ year break from employment.
• A strong desire to learn with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Attentive to detail and possess the ability to accurately record experimental details and results.
• Enjoy working both independently and collaboratively with a team in a laboratory setting.

The Recursion Community

While we offer cutting-edge tools, the secret sauce is our people. Our organization structure and culture isn’t driven by politics or ego, it is designed first and foremost to help you do your best work. We live and work by values that we see as the strategic differentiators that give us a competitive advantage, allowing for better and faster work that isn’t predicated on burnout and encourages us to make leaps where others take steps. This is a place where people in every role and every level make the bold bets that create large leaps forward on a regular basis! 

The Perks You’ll Enjoy as a Returner Recursionaut

• Paid sick pay and additional flexibility as needed.
• Complimentary chef-prepared lunches and well-stocked snack bars (Salt Lake City).
• One-of-a-kind 100,000 square foot headquarters complete with a 70-foot climbing wall, showers, lockers and bike parking (Salt Lake City).
• Weekly Returners Skill Development Classes.
• 1:1 Weekly Mentorship with a member of your team and a member of the Returnship ERG.

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 leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generate 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 Toronto, Montréal, New York, London, Oxford area, 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.  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.

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.