Your work will change lives. Including your own.
The Impact You’ll Make
As Senior Protein Scientist, you will be instrumental in driving the success of Recursion’s pipeline by managing CRO partnerships for protein production. You’ll be responsible for ensuring excellence in recombinant protein design, expression, purification, and QC to assist critical discovery projects from early stages through Lead Optimisation. Working with a fellow Senior Protein Scientist and reporting to the Associate Director, Protein Science, you will collaborate closely with Recursion’s discovery teams and external partners, ensuring the delivery of high-quality protein reagents.
In this role, you will:
- Act as a contact and expert in protein production outsourcing (design, expression, purification, QC, biophysics) to support in vitro assays and structural biology.
- Collaborate with internal teams (mainly Structural Biology, Primary Pharmacology, Project Biology, Procurement), Protein Science, and CROs to optimize strategies for challenging protein targets and guide the CRO approach.
- Build strong relationships with project leads and stakeholders to manage expectations and drive project impact.
- Assist in the delivery of concise reports to summarise the current CRO portfolio status and immediate priorities to relevant stakeholders from your team.
- Build continuous improvement activities and data capture in the team. Apply problem solving skills to identify workflow efficiencies and implement solutions to enhance processes and share learnings/changes to stakeholders.
- Support experimental teams at Milton Park for biophysical characterization of target proteins if required.
The Team You’ll Join
Success in this role will depend on your ability to foster strong, collaborative relationships both internally and externally. You will be part of a small team and your skills in effective communication and co-enabling a positive, high performance environment will be crucial in driving project success and continuous process improvement.
The Experience You’ll NeedEssential technical competencies and educational requirements:
- PhD/DPhil in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology or a related science. Alternatively, MSc/BSc in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology or a related science plus an additional 2+ years of lab-based, practical experience.
- 3+ years of experience in an industrial Protein Sciences environment.
- Proven experience in designing constructs and protein engineering for recombinant protein production for use in downstream applications (structural studies, biophysical characterisation, and assay development).
- Proven experience and troubleshooting in cell culturing techniques and expression of recombinant proteins (high-throughput, small and large scale) including bacterial (E. coli), insect (Baculovirus) and Mammalian (HEK & CHO, transient and stable) expression systems.
- Proven experience and troubleshooting in the purification and QC (high-throughput, small and large scale) of a variety of recombinant proteins including affinity, ion exchange and size exclusion chromatography, SDS-PAGE and Western blotting, spectroscopy and the use of FPLC (ÄKTA systems).
- Ability to use protein analysis techniques to study and optimize recombinant proteins (Mass spectrometry, DLS, Thermal shift assays, aSEC/FSEC).
- Demonstrable analytical approach to problem solving, with an adaptability to work across multiple projects.
Desirable technical competencies:
- Proven experience working successfully with CRO partners.
- Experience in successfully optimising expression and purification of membrane protein targets for structural studies/assay development.
Working Location:
This position is based at our office located in Oxford. This would initially be at the Schrodinger site (Oxford) but would eventually transition in 2025 to the Milton Park site (Abingdon). Please note that we utilize a hybrid working environment and ask that employees spend at least 50% of their time in the office.
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The Values We Hope You Share:
- We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
- We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
- We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
- We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
- We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
- We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.
Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.
More About Recursion
Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. 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.
Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in London, Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.
Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer that values diversity and inclusion. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation. Recursion welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.
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What We Do
We are a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology by integrating technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, data science and engineering to industrialize drug discovery. We are leveraging new technology to create virtuous cycles of learning around datasets to build the next-generation biopharmaceutical company. It’s complex biology, decoded. While we are united in a common mission, Decoding Biology to Radically Improve Lives, our greatest strength lies in our differences: expertise, gender, race, disciplines, experience, and perspectives. Deliberately building and cultivating this culture is critical to achieving our audacious goals. We are proudly headquartered in Salt Lake City.
Why Work With Us
We are the leading AI/ML-driven drug discovery company, running +1.5 million experiments every week as we develop a map of human biology. This approach has created one of the largest, broadest and deepest pipelines of any technology-enabled drug discovery company.
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