Molecular Biologist (High-Throughput Microbiology)

The Opportunity (Full-time, San Francisco)

Taxa engineers the microbiome. We design live bacterial therapeutics and deliver them to people. This role supports both our deployed probiotics and the pipeline behind them: the strains we ship today and the ones we're building next.

We are seeking an expert in high-throughput microbiology to own the large and growing body of isolate work at the center of our lab: isolation, screening, and characterization. This includes phenotypic and genotypic assays, including in vitro microbial-interaction assays, and whole-genome sequencing. While you will own our isolate pipeline end to end, you must also be fluent enough in shotgun metagenomics and laboratory automation to add depth and redundancy across the company’s core NGS pipeline.

You'll both run the pipeline and improve it. You will need to miniaturize multiple unit operations using liquid-handling and colony-handling systems, navigate the practical realities of automation (plate and tube formats, racking, colony pickers, replicators, sample tracking), and stand up new workflows as the science demands. The work moves fast and closes the loop quickly: you'll see results in days, not quarters, and while everything we do is ultimately in service of products, we constantly find ourselves chasing genuinely interesting biological questions along the way.

Nothing in your workflow is a black box: you've interrogated every medium, reagent, assay, and instrument a sample touches, and you build workflows that are reproducible, traceable, and dependent on processes rather than people. You'll operate as an independent scientist within a lean, highly skilled team, with full ownership over your workflows, your research agenda, and their results.

Required Qualifications

✔️ High-throughput bacterial isolation and culture — Expertise isolating, culturing, and maintaining diverse bacteria at scale, including selective/differential media design, colony picking and arraying into plate formats, and cryobanking. Fluent in the realities of non-model organisms with slow or fastidious growth.

✔️ Automation expertise — Expertise developing and running high-throughput microbiology and genomics protocols on liquid-handling and colony-handling robots (e.g., Opentrons, Tecan, Avidien/Apricot, QPix etc), including the platforms our NGS workflows run on, plus hardware integration and sample-tracking systems.

✔️ High-throughput screening and microbial-interaction assays — designing and running phenotypic and genotypic screens across thousands of isolates (e.g., growth/inhibition assays, colony PCR, marker genotyping, arrayed functional and co-culture assays), and building triage logic that prioritizes which strains advance.

✔️ Sequencing and shotgun metagenomics — hands-on experience in NGS library prep, shotgun metagenomics, and isolate whole-genome sequencing on short- and long-read platforms (Illumina, ONT, Element).

✔️ Laboratory and data organization — maintains a spotless, efficient lab; tracks every isolate, plate, reagent, and instrument with precision; uses ELNs and structured metadata so workflows are fully documented, traceable, and reproducible.

✔️ Full on-site availability — based in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area.

✔️ Authorized to work in the U.S. — Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Highly Desirable Experience

✔️ High-throughput metabolomics — generating metabolomics data at scale from bacterial cultures and co-cultures to enrich screening and interaction readouts, with room to build out other omics layers over time.

✔️ Low-biomass and challenging samples, including non-model organisms — recovering and isolating organisms from low-biomass, mixed, or otherwise difficult primary samples.

✔️ Molecular biology and biochemical assays — a broad wet-lab toolkit beyond culture and sequencing, including in vitro protein activity assays and other biochemical/molecular readouts used to characterize strains and their products.

✔️ Miniaturization, cost-down, and method development from literature — scaling workflows down in volume and cost while holding data quality, and rapidly evaluating, implementing, and adapting protocols from publications to specific organisms and platforms.

✔️ Troubleshooting complex failures — diagnosing multi-factor issues spanning culture, assay chemistry, instrumentation, and sequencing.

Transparent Compensation

✔️ Base salary — $130,000 annual salary.

✔️ Equity — meaningful equity package as a core component of total compensation.

✔️ Benefits — comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

✔️ Retirement — 401(k) plan with 6% employer match.