Tissue Culture Core Research Associate 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.

Tissue Culture Core Returnship

As the engine for Recursion's biological discovery, the Tissue Culture Core provides and maintains the high-quality cellular models that power our platform. Our diverse and collaborative team combines deep scientific expertise with industrial automation and cutting-edge technology to manage the complete cell culture lifecycle—from sourcing and expansion to rigorous quality control. Our mission is to fuel the search for novel biology and help fulfill Recursion's ultimate goal: getting better drugs to patients, faster.As a key member of the Tissue Culture Core, you will:

• Drive Large-Scale Cell Production: Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of diverse cellular models, from thaw to cryopreservation. You will execute large-scale expansions using advanced technologies like bioreactors and multi-layer vessels to ensure a consistent, high-quality supply for the Recursion platform.
• Uphold Quality and Process Excellence: Focus on the quality and robustness of all cellular products. You will help characterize our models, optimize culture protocols, and meticulously document process data to track key metrics and drive continuous improvement in our methodologies.
• Enable a Data-Driven Platform: Be responsible for the critical delivery of both high-quality cellular materials and the precise, well-documented data that accompanies them. Your work will directly fuel the high-throughput operations of the Recursion OS and contribute to our core mission.

The Experience You’ll Need

• Must have 3 years working experience in a research laboratory, preferably with mammalian cell culture
• -and-
• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Biology, Biochemistry, Bioengineering, or related major.
• Must have taken a 2+ year break from employment.
• A strong sense of curiosity and desire to learn with excellent written and verbal communication skills. 
• Attentiveness to detail and the ability to accurately and honestly record experimental details, cell expansion details, and results.
• Enjoy working both collaboratively and independently with a team in a laboratory setting.
• Thrive in fast-paced environments where you’ll leverage creativity and independent thinking.

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.