Strain Engineer - (Senior) Scientist

At New Culture, we are making cow cheese without the cow. Dairy cheese is unsustainable and plant-based cheeses don’t work. Ours are sustainable, healthy, ethical, and indistinguishable from current dairy options in taste, texture, and function. Using fermentation to produce dairy proteins, food science to combine those proteins with natural ingredients, and traditional cheesemaking methods to make any cheese of choice, we are bringing about a new culture for the cheese industry.

We are a Bay Area-based, venture-backed startup in an exciting growth and rapid expansion phase. We are looking for a (Senior) Scientist, Strain Engineering to join us in leading the global transformation to an animal-free dairy future. As an early member of the team, you will have significant influence and responsibility in determining the success and trajectory of New Culture. The ideal candidate is looking for a new challenge in a fast-moving, collaborative environment and has several years of experience in manipulating microbial hosts. 

What will you be doing:

• Conceiving, designing, executing, analyzing, documenting, and communicating experiments directed toward improving host engineering tools and developing commercially relevant production strains.
• Owning projects and taking initiative to try new approaches
• Developing, troubleshooting, modifying, and documenting protocols and assays
• Collaborating both within and outside of the Strain Engineering team, with particular emphasis on working closely with the Bioprocess (fermentation + DSP) team.
• As appropriate, training, mentoring, and/or managing other researchers
• Regularly communicating technical progress with the Strain Engineering team and broader company

What we expect from you:

• PhD w/ 0-3 years of industry experience, MS with 5+ years of industry experience, or BS with 8+ years of industry experience.
• Hands-on experience with and mechanistic understanding of several of the following:
• Recombinant protein expression
• Building and optimizing tools for genome manipulation
• Constructing libraries and devising screening/selection strategies
• Microbial cell biology and/or physiology
• Scale-down models of fermentation
• Robust hands-on experience with at least two different classes of of microbe (gram negative bacteria, gram positive bacteria, yeast, and filamentous fungi)
• Strong quantitative reasoning skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication

Even better if you had:

• Experience with collecting and analyzing genomics and/or transcriptomics data.
• Experience with strains deployed for commercial production
• Proficiency with basic coding/scripting
• Experience executing high throughput experiments

How to know you are a great fit:

We look for candidates who are team players, learners, doers, and hungry to make a difference in the world. Creativity and resourcefulness, honesty and empathy go a long way. Our five core values guide us on our path to achieving our mission. 

Determination with Kindness | Have the resolve, the drive, and the will to succeed, but do it with empathy, encouragement, and compassion. In the face of adversity we will only excel as a team by keeping kindness at the forefront of everything we do.

Creativity with Transparency | Creativity, persistence, questioning, and crazy ideas to solve hard problems are essential to our work. We do all of this out in the open while being honest and forthright about the new things we’re trying, getting feedback and input from our teammates along the way. 

Teamwork with Rigor | Hold yourself and those around you to high standards and understand how your responsibilities are interconnected with others’. As much as you rely on your teammates, they’re relying on you, and only with consistent communication and rigorous teamwork will we achieve our goals together.

Speed with Focus | We move quickly, exploring new opportunities and incorporating new results to make progress rapidly. Remaining focused throughout our experimentations means making thoughtful decisions, listening to a range of perspectives, and moving forward as a unified team once we’ve committed to the path ahead.

Love the Product | The science is cool but the product is even cooler. Our breakthroughs are always in the pursuit of better products. It’s by selling delicious dairy that we will bring about a successful future for New Culture and a positive impact for our customers and the planet.

New Culture is committed to promoting and creating a diverse, inclusive environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. Diversity is the foundation of what we do at New Culture, enabling us to build a company that celebrates what makes each of us unique.