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 light, mainly keeping cultures healthy.

One thing to be clear about: this job is about execution, done exceptionally well. You will spend most of your day at the bench. You will not be asked to design studies or write protocols from scratch. What matters is that your technique is precise, that you follow SOPs with minimal guidance, that you notice when something looks wrong and say so, and that your notes let anyone see exactly what was done. People who do this well become the backbone of a lab, and over time take on training others and improving the protocols themselves.

In your first month, you will complete safety and BSL-2 training, learn our SOPs for cell culture, RT-qPCR, western blot, and ELISA. You will be fluent in how we document experiments.

By two months, you will be running RT-qPCR, western blots, and ELISAs on your own from SOP, with data that meets our quality criteria the first time and handling multiple assays in a single day. You will be running biomarker kits from SOP across sample types. You will have started tissue processing and primary cell isolation alongside a SRA or scientist.

By three months, you will be processing animal and human tissue and isolating primary cells independently, and owning the sample processing, molecular, and biomarker readouts for a study, with no experiment repeated because of an execution error.

At six months and beyond, you will be a trusted executor supporting several programs and biomarker panels across indications in parallel, flagging problems early, proposing improvements to our protocols, and training new teammates on the assays you know best.

And You:

You take real pride in doing careful work well. You like the craft of the bench, and you know that a clean replicate or an uncontaminated culture is the result of discipline, not luck.

You want to contribute to an early-stage startup working on diseases of aging, in a fast-paced environment where your data directly informs which targets move forward.

Your hands are excellent. You have accurate, reproducible pipetting technique across volume ranges, including multichannel work in plates, and you are happy to show us at the bench.

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:

Gordian 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.