Advanced Cellular Engineering (ACE) Returnship
Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Your work will change lives. Including your own.
We are leveraging new technology to create virtuous cycles of learning around datasets to build a next-generation biopharmaceutical company. It’s complex biology, decoded.
Recursion is a digital biology company industrializing drug discovery. We are working to solve some of the hardest, most meaningful problems facing human health today. Come join us in our mission to decode biology to radically improve lives, while doing the most impactful work of your life.
Recursion’s Returnship Program
Our Returnship program is sponsored by the Women at Recursion Employee Resource Group. The program is aimed at helping those who have taken a hiatus (2+ years) from the STEM industry have the opportunity to return to the workforce in a learning environment with support from teams and mentors. This allows our company to tap into an underutilized pool of talent in Utah, and leverage the experience and skills of previous work and life experiences, while also providing opportunity to learn and develop experience in new cutting-edge tools and technology. This sixteen-week program will enable you to have ownership of projects that can deeply impact the company’s mission to radically decode biology and serve patients, while having the guidance, support and mentorship has you re-enter the workforce. Each Returner will be assigned a mentor who will meet with them weekly, as well as weekly seminars on workplace culture, communication and technology.
Our returner program lasts 4 months, running from February 2025 through end of May 2025, with potential for transition into full-time employment depending on performance and availability. This position is based in our Salt Lake City, UT headquarters, with some hybrid working flexibility available.
Advanced Cellular Engineering (ACE) Returnship
The ACE team is a diverse, collaborative group working on complex human cell models for drug discovery. This team works on iPSC differentiation techniques, process development for scaled cell production, assay development for cell characterization, and gene editing techniques to deliver data packages that drive decisions about cellular models and compound selection. With a mission of bringing transformative medicines to patients, this high performing team works together to continually improve our workflows. The ACE returner will work alongside, and in support of, R&D scientists. The returner will be trained and mentored by a scientist. Interaction with other team members outside of ACE will occur on a daily basis as needed during the returnship period.
Working alongside Recursion’s ACE team within the OS Hub. You will work on projects to:
- Perform tissue culture activities such as cell thawing, passing and banking of complex human cell models such as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and/or iPSC-derived cell types
- Maintain in vitro cell cultures for small, moderate, and high-throughput production scale systems, providing critical cellular reagents to meet screening platform need
- Capture data via automated imaging runs and set up basic image analyses
- Document project activities using an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) and interact with a laboratory information system (LIMS) for reagent tracking, SOPs, and QC
- Improve data management workflows and support inventory tracking
- Deliver data to drive progress on critical scientific projects with assays such as immunofluorescence, qPCR, ELISA, etc.
The Recursion Community
While we offer cutting-edge tools, the secret sauce is our people. Our organization structure and culture isn’t driven by politics or ego, it is designed first and foremost to help you do your best work. We live and work by values that we see as the strategic differentiators that give us a competitive advantage, allowing for better and faster work that isn’t predicated on burnout and encourages us to make leaps where others take steps. This is a place where people in every role and every level make the bold bets that create large leaps forward on a regular basis!
The Experience You’ll Need
- Must have 3 years working experience in a research laboratory, preferably with mammalian cell culture
- -and-
- Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Biology, Biochemistry, Bioengineering, or related major.
- Must have taken a 2+ year break from employment
- A strong desire to learn with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Are attentive to detail and have the ability to accurately record experimental details and results
- Enjoy working both independently and collaboratively with a team in a laboratory setting
- Thrive in fast-paced environments where you’ll leverage creativity and independent thinking
The Perks You’ll Enjoy as a Returner Recursionaut:
- Paid PTO, including sick pay and a one-week break for spring break and additional flexibility as needed.
- Complimentary chef-prepared lunches and well-stocked snack bars (Salt Lake City)
- One-of-a-kind 100,000 square foot headquarters complete with a 70-foot climbing wall, showers, lockers and bike parking (Salt Lake City)
- Weekly Returners Skill Development Classes
- 1:1 Weekly Mentorship
The Values That We Hope You Share:
- We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
- We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
- We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover.
- Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
- We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.
Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work. You can read more about our values and how we live them every day here.
More About Recursion
Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.
Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in London, Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.