Staff Research Associate - Tech Dev

Company Description

Guardant Health is a leading precision oncology company focused on helping conquer cancer globally through use of its proprietary blood tests, vast data sets and advanced analytics. The Guardant Health Oncology Platform leverages capabilities to drive commercial adoption, improve patient clinical outcomes and lower healthcare costs across all stages of the cancer care continuum. Guardant Health has launched liquid biopsy-based Guardant360®, Guardant360 CDx and GuardantOMNI® tests for advanced stage cancer patients. These tests fuel development of its LUNAR program, which aims to address the needs of early stage cancer patients with neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatment selection, cancer survivors with surveillance, asymptomatic individuals eligible for cancer screening and individuals at a higher risk for developing cancer with early detection.

Job Description

Position Summary:

To enable Guardant Health to lead the disruption of cancer treatments through non-invasive cancer screening, the Technology Development Team is seeking a highly motivated Staff Research Associate to help develop, test and improve sample preparation technologies for rare variant studies with next-generation sequencing. At Guardant, we leverage the most advanced technologies and work with leaders in many different fields to create the most impactful and meaningful technologies for cancer management.

As a Staff Research Associate supporting platform and technology development, you will work collaboratively with members within the team and interface cross-functionally with process engineering, product development, reagent manufacturing, bioinformatics, and other early research development teams. You will be hands-on in the lab to evaluate and optimize platform development related to liquid biopsy sequencing technologies for the detection, treatment, and monitoring of all cancer types. You will play a crucial role in the implementation and validation of our advanced cancer diagnostics product as well as future product offerings.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities: 

• Assess and implement changes to improve liquid biopsy assay performance
• Work closely with scientists of the platform development team to identify areas for improvement in current assays and implement solutions
• Collaborate within Technology Development and cross-functionally with automation engineering, product development, reagent manufacturing, and other early research development teams
• Troubleshoot error modes in a laboratory setting
• Train junior team members if needed
• Be highly committed to delivering results in a fast-faced and rapidly growing organization
• Document technical evaluations and provide SOP as needed
• Present data and progress in various meetings.

Qualifications

• BA/BS in a scientific field with a minimum of 6+ years of industry experience, MA/MS degree with 4+ years of industry experience, or PhD.
• Experience in research development and/or optimization of NGS technologies with a strong preference for experience with cell-free nucleic acids.
• Solid foundation in laboratory techniques including sample preparation for NGS
• Analytical mindset to dissect complex problems, develop hypotheses, test them, synthesize results to inform solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to document and communicate scientific data to an interdisciplinary audience
• Synthesizing large datasets and extract relevant trends using NGS data analysis tools (Python, R, IGV) is desired but not necessary
• Committed team player; enjoys working both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced environment and able to adapt to change
• Strong underlying curiosity and drive
• Sense of humor is a must

Additional Information

Hybrid Work Model: At Guardant Health, we have defined days for in-person/onsite collaboration and work-from-home days for individual-focused time. All U.S. employees who live within 50 miles of a Guardant facility will be required to be onsite on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We have found aligning our scheduled in-office days allows our teams to do the best work and creates the focused thinking time our innovative work requires. At Guardant, our work model has created flexibility for better work-life balance while keeping teams connected to advance our science for our patients.

Covid Vaccination Policy:  Starting January 7, 2022, Guardant Health will require all employees to be fully vaccinated to either (a) establish that they have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19; or (b) request and obtain an approved exemption from Guardant’s COVID-19 U.S. Vaccination Policy as a reasonable accommodation, as consistent with a