Research Associate I/II (Temporary), Ex Vivo & Assays

The posting, as Gordian Biotechnology wrote it

Are your hands the ones a lab trusts — the person whose replicates line up, whose cultures stay clean, and whose notes anyone could follow?
Gordian’s discovery engine tests hundreds of targets at once, and every promising hit has to prove itself in real tissue before it can become a medicine. The data that makes those calls comes from the bench. In this role, you will produce it: running our core molecular, protein, biomarker, and cell-based assays and supporting ex vivo work in animal and human tissue, to a standard the whole team can build on.
Journey + Destination:

Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company designed as a machine that systematically
reveals the right way to cure age-related diseases: a machine for creating time.

To do that, we built Mosaic Screening, which makes causal validation both grounded in human
pathophysiology and radically more scalable in living diseased tissue. It lets us measure the causal effects of hundreds of perturbations directly in vivo, which reveals therapeutic maxima across vast target spaces (more details on our website and in our preprint ). The machine is already producing wins: across six disease areas, we have mapped nearly as many targets as the field reported in 20 years , advanced a novel osteoarthritis candidate into IND-enabling studies, and started an obesity drug-discovery collaboration with Pfizer.

But there are still many diseases left to cure, and expanding the machine to tackle them starts with its most important resource: its people and culture. We work as a team , using clear goals, open communication, and direct feedback to make autonomous decisions with the bigger picture in mind. We aim for extraordinary outcomes , continually improving how we work and acting on what will create the most progress, even in unknown territory. We have deliberately designed an environment to sustain that standard: few standing meetings, hands-on experimentation and pre-mortems, weekly team lunches, and unlimited vacation that people are encouraged to use. You can dive deeper into our culture here .

This way of working has been crucial to Gordian’s success. In this role, you will help turn the targets the machine produces into small molecule medicines.

The Role

Your primary mission as a Research Associate is to generate clean, reproducible data that the team can trust the first time. You will run our established protocols for RNA extraction and RT-qPCR, western blot, ELISA, and mammalian cell culture; run biomarker assays on plasma, serum, urine, tissue, and culture samples across our disease indications; and support ex vivo work: processing animal and human donor tissue and establishing primary cell cultures for target validation studies. You will work closely with the scientists on our ex vivo team, who design the experiments; you make sure they are executed exactly as written. This role involves no live animal work; mouse tissue comes from our in vivo team. Weekend work is occasional and l
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You have done the core assays yourself. You have personally run RNA extraction and RT-qPCR, western blots, and ELISAs from start to finish, including biomarker assays on biological samples such as plasma, serum, urine, or tissue lysates, and you have routine experience with mammalian cell culture and aseptic technique.
You have worked with primary cells or tissue. You have dissected or processed tissue and isolated primary cells from mouse or human sources, and you are comfortable learning the other.
You follow protocols exactly and document everything. You can work from a written SOP with minimal guidance, record deviations as they happen, and keep notes that another person could reproduce your work from.
You have a BS in biology, biochemistry, or a related life science, and 1-3 years of hands-on lab experience in industry or academia.
You are looking for a 12+ month temporary role, with the possibility of converting to a permanent position.
Additional valuable skills if you have them

• An MS in life science.
• Experience in biotech, pharma, or a CRO.
• Handling human donor tissue under BSL-2, with bloodborne pathogen training.
• Rodent tissue dissection and harvest.
• Precision-cut tissue slices, organoids, or iPSC culture.
• Multiplex biomarker platforms such as MSD, Luminex, or Simoa.
• Flow cytometry, immunostaining, or histology.
• Higher-throughput, plate-based workflows or automated liquid handling.
• Experience with heart failure, kidney, metabolic, or musculoskeletal biology, or their biomarkers.

The Details

Go rdian aims to provide everything you need to thrive. Beyond or community and science, you’ll have a competitive salary, full health/dental/vision/life insurance, 401k with match, onsite lunch paid for 3 days a week, an onsite gym, whatever vacation you need to be at your peak, and access to world-class mentors and advisors to support your professional growth. Our building is in the heart of the biotech capital of South San Francisco.