Are you ready to take on pivotal work that will aid Gordian Biotechnology in pinpointing the most promising therapeutic targets for the development of novel drugs? Join our Apprenticeship Program and help us on our mission to cure age-related disease. We want people to lead longer, healthier lives and wake up every morning, more capable than the day before!

Our Destination:

Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company whose mission is to cure age-related disease and wake up every morning more capable than the day before.

Traditional ex vivo screening methods have failed to produce effective treatments, as age-related diseases have complex causes that include interactions with the aged environment.

To address this problem, Gordian’s platform is the first and only to enable pooled in vivo tests at scale, across different species of diseased animals reflecting patient profiles. We are able to deliver and test hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals, and scale efficacy testing to rapidly prioritize targets and interventions with a clear path toward development (more info on our website). 

We are running this discovery engine to ensure an abundance of therapeutic hypotheses can be tested for complex diseases, eventually mapping out the effects of every druggable target across many diseases, and advancing programs both internally and through collaborations with external partners. By working across related sets of indications, we can identify medicines with impacts on age-related multimorbidity.

About the Role:

Our apprenticeship offers a holistic experience in early-stage biotech, enabling you to refine practical laboratory skills while undertaking substantive, hands-on projects that will significantly expand your knowledge base. You'll play a pivotal role in assisting Gordian in identifying optimal therapeutic targets for new drug development.

This opportunity grants you the chance to be at the forefront of rapid innovation, providing you with an insider's perspective into the dynamic landscape of a rapidly growing startup. As we progress further along the drug development pipeline, you’ll be actively involved in utilizing our platform to forecast preclinical and clinical physiological responses through our proprietary in vivo Mosaic screens. As a full-time team member you will collaborate closely with disease specialists, gene therapists, and our platform and data teams, gaining diverse experience within our collaborative matrix team environment.

In this program, you’ll not only build crucial skills and experience as an early-career scientist, but also as a biotech professional, with insight into what it takes to build and grow a biotech company. You will learn about science, and the business of science, through company lunch and learns, monthly industry happy hours (hosted by Gordian), our exclusive speaker series, where you’ll hear from experienced industry/academic experts, and finally through 1:1 time with our founders. 

The year-long program will start in early June, and our ultimate goal is to give you an experience that will help inform the next steps in your career, whether that is at Gordian or providing you with connections and networking opportunities in both industry and academia that will set you up for whatever path you are passionate about pursuing. 

In addition, we offer competitive benefits with medical/dental/vision insurance, a 4% 401K employer match, free lunch 3x a week, and so much more! 

What You’ll Learn:

The most important things are (in no particular order) interest, intelligence, and a willingness to work hard (alongside equally hard-working colleagues). Prior lab experience is definitely a plus, especially the ability to follow protocols well and think critically about and understand what you’re doing. Whatever you do or do not know, we are excited to teach you and help you gain experience in areas that you are passionate or curious about:

• Enzymatic assays: Extracting protein/DNA/RNA from tissue samples, running assays like ELISA/spectrophotometry to measure protein and lipid levels.
• Histology: Sectioning, staining, taking pictures and/or analyzing histological data. Bonus points for experience with mammalian tissues.
• Mouse work: Colony maintenance, feeding, dosing oral treatments. Experience with blood draws, necropsies, and/or survival surgeries is a plus.
• Plasmid cloning and production: standard DNA cloning techniques including PCR, gel electrophoresis, bacterial transformation, picking colonies, mini/midi-prep. Experience in plasmid design/maintenance on Benchling is a plus.
• Sequencing: Creating and processing sequencing libraries. Experience with single-cell technologies or Illumina sequencers is a plus.
• Tissue dissociation: Taking tissues from our in vivo screens and turning them into single-cell suspensions. Experience with animal sacrifices, fixation, and RNA quality control for RNA-seq are all pluses. 
• Flow cytometry: Ability to calibrate a cytometer, set gates to segregate cells from debris, and determine the percentage of fluorescent cells in a population. Experience with sorting and multiple fluorophores is a plus.
• Large-scale genomic data analysis: Wrangling high-dimensional next-gen sequencing data specifically related to single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) of disease and healthy tissues, and the associated workflows, tools and packages for performing appropriate quality control and statistical analyses of the same (e.g. using Scanpy, Seurat).
• Data Communication & Cloud Infrastructure: Expert at distilling complex analysis into accessible visualizations for diverse audiences while leveraging AWS and Google Cloud (Linux environments) for seamless data storage and pipeline integration.
• A grasp of start-up operations and dynamics: Operate in a culture where moving fast and taking calculated risks to drive science forward is the norm.
• Entrepreneurship: Exhibit traits such as innovation, resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.

About 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, but full of opportunities and excitement.

You are excited to use cutting-edge technology to find the best therapeutic targets, and turn those into drugs. 

You are organized and have a history of managing and collaborating on time-sensitive projects, working across multiple teams.

You have foundational knowledge of biology and can articulate how this apprenticeship supports your long-term development in the field.

Please note: The application window is open starting Feb 9th, but we will not start actively recruiting for this position until mid-March. Please reach out to barrett@gordian.bio with any questions about timelines.

Our Journey:

Our mission is audacious, and the path will be full of both challenges and excitement. Two things characterize the Gordian experience: 1) We work as a team, with ownership in our own roles and trust in each other. 2) We strive for extraordinary outcomes, and in doing so grow our skills and capability.

Team – Relying on each other begins with transparency. We set clear goals, visibly connecting individuals and teams to our company objectives. This empowers each of us to make autonomous decisions about our work, knowing how they will affect the bigger picture. Our communication happens out in the open and our team is geared towards helping each other out. We provide support for each others’ projects, both experimentally as well as through “pre-mortem” meetings to discuss possible failure modes and experimental design. We give and receive feedback,, share mistakes, and ask for help.

Extraordinary – Every day, we ask ourselves “could this process/outcome be even better?”. Knowing our overall mission, we do what we think helps us make the most progress and we don’t shy away from big challenges or unknown territory, but find a way to excel. Our colleagues are amazing, both at what they do and as people. They inspire us to keep up, to not let them down, and be inspiring in return.

You can dive deeper into our culture Here.