Research Associate - Biosensing

Melody is an early-stage focused research organization engineering continuous molecular monitoring technology and designing closed-loop interventions for human health. We leverage protein engineering, medical device engineering, and physiology modeling. As a FRO, we uniquely bridge blue-sky science and hardcore manufacturing and pioneer new applications.

We are a nonprofit startup based in Pasadena, founded by scientists and engineers from Janelia and Caltech and incubated by Convergent Research. Our goal is to produce public goods: biosensors, devices, datasets, protocols, and tools that help launch a broader field of real-time molecular medicine.

About the role: we are hiring a Research Associate to work with the scientific team to build and run Melody’s bioelectronics foundry. You will be responsible for evolving and testing new protein biosensors. Your work will involve molecular biology, liquid handling robotics, and novel hardware developed by the team for running biophysical assays. You will work closely with the chemistry and device engineering teams to move biosensor candidates from DNA constructs to purified proteins, screening data, device-relevant assays, and quantitative performance measurements.

You may excel in this role if you enjoy using an engineering mindset in wet lab biology, developing an intuition of how proteins behave from hands-on work, and working in a team-setting to pioneer new methods. Specifically you will:

• Express and purify engineered binders and biosensors.
• Design, order, and prepare DNA constructs, mutant libraries, and binder-reporter variants.
• Run fluorescence, plate-reader, biochemical, biophysical, and novel device-based assays.
• Generate dose-response curves and quantify EC50/Kd, dynamic range, signal-to-noise, selectivity, kinetics, reversibility, stability, and drift.
• Support yeast display, FACS-based screening, and directed evolution workflows.
• Interface biosensors with optical and electrochemical readouts on benchtop hardware.
• Help automate assay workflows using liquid handlers, plate readers, and custom scripts.
• Maintain clean records of constructs, samples, sequence-function relationships, assay metadata, instrument settings, and experimental results.
• Collaborate with scientists and engineers to turn one-off assays into repeatable workflows that scale to the needs of the platform.

Required Qualifications:

• BA or BS in biology, chemistry, physics or other relevant field.
• 2+ years experience in wet lab bench involving protein engineering or biophysical assays.
• Demonstrated precision in experimental work and project management.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Extensive knowledge of biophysical methods and associated instrumentation for thermodynamics and kinetics measurements.
• Ability to write custom scripts in Python/R for data analysis
• Experience with lab automation techniques including liquid handling robots.
• Experience with biomaterial preparation and protein functionalization chemistry.
• Familiarity with industry standards in protein and device engineering.