Scientist 1, Vector Engineering

The Role

Your primary mission as Scientist, Vector Engineering, is to turn open scientific questions into answers Gordian can act on. Senior leaders will bring you a strategic goal; you’ll design the path to it, from the experimental plan, controls, and readouts to the failure modes worth planning around. Then you’ll run the work, interpret the data, and make the recommendation. Within your first two months, you’ll launch and lead a serotype screen for our new heart project. By six months, you’ll own an independent project within the team’s push to move key serotypes into suspension production, part of a goal to make more than 25% of the team’s AAV production suspension-based by Q2 2027.

You’ll also help drive the engine behind it all: the AAV production that every Gordian program depends on. Rather than handing experiments off, you’ll run them yourself, across adherent and suspension AAV production (HEK293 culture, transfections, and harvests), purification by iodixanol ultracentrifugation and FPLC. That hands-on command is what lets you troubleshoot fast, see where a method could be better, and turn that insight into your next project. You’ll calculate AAV requirements for programs, own media forecasting and reagent ordering, keep excellent ELN records, and own the vector team’s areas of responsibility. Your improvement and discovery projects get dedicated time, roughly 20% of your week, alongside reliable production and assay delivery.

This is a role for a scientist who wants their judgment to matter. When a run or assay fails, you’ll work out why from controls, batch records, and first principles, then test the fix. You’ll bring methods from the literature into Gordian, decide what to prioritize, and coordinate across the teams who depend on your material. You’ll ramp fast: within your first month you’ll be producing AAV independently, so your first project can launch between weeks four and eight.

What Success Looks Like

Within one month, you'll be completely integrated into our adherent and suspension workflows and independently execute HEK293 culture, transfections, and harvests, with accurate sample tracking and no labeling errors or sample swaps. You’ll be able to explain the rationale for key production and purification steps, the applications of relevant serotypes, and the controls needed to interpret results. You’ll be a key driver of our screening workflow, understanding and calculating AAV requirements for assigned requests and communicating progress, risks, and handoffs to requesting teams. You’ll also learn Gordian’s serotype-screen workflow and drive forward a project plan covering controls, readouts, schedule, materials, and likely failure modes.

By two months, you’ll independently perform iodixanol ultracentrifugation and FPLC purification, and own weekly media forecasting and routine reagent ordering. You’ll troubleshoot routine production and assay failures. You’ll launch the serotype screen for the new heart project, owning scheduling, execution, troubleshooting, data analysis, and recommendations, and track it against the agreed plan.

By three months, you’ll complete the heart-project serotype screen, then analyze and present the results, explain their limitations, and recommend serotypes or follow-up experiments based on the evidence. You’ll document methods, results, and decisions so others can reproduce the work. You’ll agree on the scope and plan for one defined project within the team’s suspension-production effort and begin execution. You’ll also fully own your assigned vector areas of responsibility with no preventable lapses or reagent outages.

At six months, you’ll own an independent project within the team’s suspension-production conversion effort. You’ll plan and execute it with limited guidance, interpret results, and document conclusions and next steps. Based on your results and the literature, you’ll propose follow-up work and validate the next goal and experimental plan.

And You

You want a chance to do your best work, immerse yourself, and excel alongside people who will inspire you and whom you’ll be excited to spend your days with.

You want to play a key role in an early-stage startup: A fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness.

You want your science to shape decisions, not just generate data, and you can explain how this role fits your long-term plans and Gordian’s mission.

You thrive on ambiguous problems. Given a goal without a path, you build the plan, make a call with incomplete information, and adjust as the data come in. You also love the bench, and see hands-on execution as how great scientists stay sharp.

You have a PhD in molecular biology, cell biology, or a related field (or equivalent research experience), with an understanding of molecular and cell biology deep enough to explain your experimental choices and interpret your results.

You have strong mammalian cell culture skills, accurate pipetting, and reliable sample handling, and you have learned and independently executed non-trivial laboratory protocols.

You keep complete laboratory records and traceable data, with close attention to detail.

You have taken a defined scientific project from an agreed goal and plan through execution, troubleshooting, analysis, and a supported conclusion.

You design proper controls, use the literature to select methods, anticipate failure modes, distinguish a technical failure from a biological result, and can justify your next experiment.

You have handled multiple workflows or projects at once and communicated dependencies clearly to the people relying on you.

Prior AAV purification experience, especially iodixanol ultracentrifugation or FPLC, is a big plus. If you haven’t done these yet, don’t worry, we can teach you! We care more about your scientific judgment and ability to learn quickly than prior mastery of every AAV technique.

Bonus points for relevant wet-lab experience such as qPCR, Western blot, SDS-PAGE, and transfection; experience with FPLC, TFF, depth filtration, or related flow systems; and previous work with AAV, lentivirus, or gene therapy.

The Details

Gordian aims to provide everything you need to thrive. Beyond our community and science, you’ll have enough equity to be a true stakeholder in the company, 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, remote work flexibility, 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.

Are you ready to decide which AAV serotypes carry Gordian’s next therapeutics into the heart, and to help reinvent how we make AAV at scale?

As a Scientist on our Vector Engineering team, you’ll work directly with senior leaders to take strategic goals and turn them into experimental plans and projects that you launch and lead. Your results will decide which serotypes we take forward for our new heart program, and shape how Gordian scales AAV production through suspension culture.

About Gordian

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, revealing the best therapeutic targets 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. And every Mosaic screen runs on AAV, which is where you come in.