Scientist - Computational Biophysics

About the Company

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward an abundant future. Projects supported by Astera operate like high-velocity startups, focusing on ambitious goals and attracting strong technical talent to accelerate innovation.

Responsibilities

• Build ensemble-aware protein representations that integrate PLM and LLM embeddings with experimentally derived structural heterogeneity
• Design, develop, and maintain large-scale bioinformatic pipelines for high-dimensional datasets
• Fine-tune or architect ML models to capture sequence-structure-function relationships
• Synthesize diverse data sources including evolutionary history, binding affinity, and allostery
• Collaborate with experimental partners to ground computational representations in real biological measurements
• Contribute to the diffUSE infrastructure to establish community-wide standards for dynamic structural biology

Requirements

• PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, machine learning, or a related field
• Strong understanding of protein structure and function
• Experience building large bioinformatic pipelines and managing high-dimensional datasets
• Proficiency in fine-tuning or modifying ML models, such as transformer-based architectures

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with protein language models like ESM or AlphaFold