Scientist - Protein Engineering

About the Company

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement diverse protein engineering strategies including rational design, computational modeling, directed evolution, and combinatorial libraries
• Build and characterize protein variants at high throughput to test and iterate hypotheses rapidly
• Implement and optimize scalable workflows from library generation and expression to standard and custom assays
• Collaborate with the computational team to establish models linking sequences and structures to function
• Explore mechanisms behind complex biomolecules to translate understanding into creative designs
• Develop novel screening and validation methods to accelerate the design-build-iterate loop

Requirements

• PhD in Bioengineering, Biophysics, Biochemistry, or a related field, or equivalent research leadership experience
• Proficiency in library construction and protein expression in mammalian cells
• Proficiency in standard protein characterization
• Comfort using computational approaches for protein engineering
• Mechanistic thinking and motivation to understand fundamental principles
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience engineering multi-state proteins, membrane proteins, or multi-component assemblies
• Experience with protein expression in primary neurons, brain organoids, or brain tissues
• Experience with large-scale screening
• Experience with creative assay development
• Familiarity with machine learning or data-driven design approaches