Senior Scientist: Bench Scale Process Development

About Wildtype

Wildtype is on a mission to create the cleanest, most sustainable seafood on the planet, starting with sushi-grade salmon. We’re pioneering cellular agriculture to protect wild species and our oceans, and to reverse trends of global food insecurity. Wildtype will provide consumers with a new option for real seafood that provides the same nutritional benefits as the most pristine wild-caught fish, without common contaminants such as mercury, microplastics, antibiotics, or pesticides.

We were founded in 2016 by Aryé Elfenbein, a cardiologist and molecular biologist, and Justin Kolbeck (CEO), a former US diplomat who served in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in an effort to solve one of the world’s biggest problems: how to feed a growing population without stripping the earth of its natural resources and biodiversity. Investors include L Catterton, Jeff Bezos, Spark Capital, CRV, Temasek, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition, among others.

Come join us in transforming our food system for good!

Role – Senior Bench Scale Process Development Scientist

What you will own at Wildtype

• Design experiments to systematically improve culture efficiency and yield in bioreactors
• Design, implement, and optimize upstream cell culture processes for novel marine species
• Lead tech transfer to our scale up team
• Lead a group of process development associates

What you bring to the table

• 1+ years of management experience in a diverse and team-based environment
• Prior process development/optimization experience with bench scale bioreactors
• Willingness to challenge the status quo; unafraid to break things in order to build something better
• Extensive experience in bioprocess engineering, biochemical engineering, mechanical engineering, cell biology or biochemistry
• Proven track record of conceptualizing new projects and driving those projects to completion
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

What we’ll share with you

• How to apply your experience to the production of next-generation seafood
  What it is like to work in a super talented startup group, where we challenge/inspire each other to do better for the collective good of the company
  How we developed dozens of marine cell lines and adapted some of them to suspension culture, and invite you to make suggestions on how we could do better for new lines/species
  Our current suspension culture process (for you to analyze, take apart, and rebuild)

Impact plan

Within 1 month you will have formed some questions regarding Wildtype’s current suspension culture process and designed preliminary experiments to address those questions.
Within 3 months You will have set your professional development goals for the next 2 years. You will have developed your own initial hypotheses based on prior run data and started testing those hypotheses for the purpose of increasing cell culture efficiency and yield. You will have been hitting the floor and running your experiments with other crewmates.
Within 6 months you will have gathered enough data to validate/invalidate your initial hypotheses. You will have presented your findings to the entire R&D branch and made your recommendations to the next steps of process development. You will also have been exposed to our new cell line establishment/development efforts and provided your inputs from the process development perspective (eg., clone selection, culture format, feed strategy). You will have started investing some time into building/managing your own group, and/or training others on process development.
Within 12 months you will have established new bench scale processes for suspension culture of our workhorse cell lines to improve yield. You will also have developed culturing processes for multiple novel cell lines from new species.

To learn more about Wildtype and see our newest updates, check out our blog!

Wildtype is committed to building a diverse workplace spanning multiple dimensions including race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity, and veteran status.