Associate Director, In Vitro

Everything we do is in pursuit of changing lives.

Recursion is the clinical-stage biotechnology company industrializing drug discovery by decoding biology. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to infer biological relationships. 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.

While we offer cutting-edge tools and an amazing lab, 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, supporting better and faster work without burnout and encouraging 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 Impact You’ll Make

Recursion Pharmaceuticals is at the forefront of re-imagining drug discovery through the integration of automated cell biology, generation of high-dimensional and diverse data sets, and sophisticated analytics. We are seeking an Associate Director to work on human iPSC derived neural cell types, molecular and functional characterizations thereof, and developing relevant disease models. You will specifically focus on the differentiation and characterization of hPSC models involving various cell types such as neuronal subtypes and glial cells such as astrocytes and microglia. You will enable our HTS team to expedite screening at industry-leading scale to generate petabytes of high-dimensional data from human cells. You will work cross-functionally to develop robust, scalable systems and grow our Map of Biology. You will be part of tactical and strategic decision making, as well as train, mentor, and supervise associates. In this role, you will:

• Enable Recursion to build Maps of Biology by isolating, expanding, and banking iPSC-derived neuronal cell types for use in screens that incorporate CRISPR editing and gene delivery methods at scale.
• Design in vitro cell culture tools that allow for the loss of function, inducible and stable gain of function in the iPSC-neuronal human cell background and those cells that interact with neuronal cells, iPSC-microglia
• Bank cells derived from the diseased patient population of interest that have been altered for potency (iPSC) and provide for comparable lot productions of cells differentiated from these intermediates
• Train and lead team members to perform newly developed methods for scale to enable 100’s of 1536 well microplates screened per week
• Collaborate with data scientists, computational biologists, chemists, and clinical strategists across the organization to develop Recursion's data-to-therapeutic pipeline to discover new impactful medicines and ultimately serve patients

The Team You’ll Join 

Reporting to our VP, Advanced Translational Modeling, you'll join our newly formed team focused on the utilization of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) to model neurodegenerative diseases. You will be joining a fast-paced team of multi-disciplinary scientists who are focused on bringing new therapeutics to patients at an accelerated pace. This team helps Recursion develop, refine, and characterize state-of-the-art differentiation technology and advanced disease models at a large scale for one of the world’s leading companies in AI-guided drug discovery. This high performing team is bold, creative, and has a team-first mindset alongside a deep passion for exploring the unknowns in neuroscience.

The Experience You’ll Need

• PhD in Biology, Biotechnology or related field with 6+ years biotech or pharma industry related work; or MS with 9+ years of relevant biotech or pharma industry work experience
• Experience with advanced in vitro-culture techniques, ideally working on nerve cell types
• Ideally, expertise in iPSC technology, and CRISPR genome editing to develop, utilize and characterize hPSC disease models
• Experience in gene expression and gene delivery systems in the mammalian cell 
• Experience applying quality control measures of success across intermediate and differentiated cell populations
• Experience working in a fast-paced environment where you’ve leveraged creativity and independent thinking when deriving, expanding, banking and genetically perturbing challenging human cell types
• Demonstrated capacity to indep