Gordian Apprenticeship - Bioinformatics

Our Destination:

Age-related diseases have complex causes that include interactions with the aged environment, and traditional ex vivo screening methods have failed to produce compelling targets or effective treatments. To address this problem, Gordian’s platform enables in vivo Mosaic Screening to deliver and test hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals. We select the most clinically relevant Patient Avatars, whose age, physiology and genomics most closely resembles human patients. Using these and other proprietary tools, we can scale in vivo efficacy testing to more targets than have ever been explored by biopharma, at the very beginning of the drug discovery process (more info on our website). This lets us develop and commercialize therapies with greater chance of impacting the world’s deadliest diseases, and eventually for the processes of aging itself. 

About the Role:

Our year long apprenticeship offers a holistic experience in early-stage biotech, enabling you to refine practical laboratory skills while undertaking substantive, hands-on projects that will significantly expand your knowledge base. You'll play a pivotal role in assisting Gordian in identifying optimal therapeutic targets for new drug development.

This opportunity grants you the chance to be at the forefront of rapid innovation, providing you with an insider's perspective into the dynamic landscape of a rapidly growing startup. As we progress further along the drug development pipeline, you’ll be actively involved in utilizing our platform to forecast preclinical and clinical physiological responses through our proprietary in vivo Mosaic screens. As a full-time team member you will collaborate closely with disease specialists, gene therapists, and our platform and data teams, gaining diverse experience within our collaborative matrix team environment.

In this program, you’ll not only build crucial skills and experience as an early-career scientist, but also as a biotech professional, with insight into what it takes to build and grow a biotech company. You will learn about science, and the business of science, through company lunch and learns, monthly industry happy hours (hosted by Gordian), our exclusive speaker series, where you’ll hear from experienced industry/academic experts, and finally through 1:1 time with our founders. 

The year-long program will start in mid August, and our ultimate goal is to give you an experience that will help inform the next steps in your career, whether that is at Gordian or providing you with connections and networking opportunities in both industry and academia that will set you up for whatever path you are passionate about pursuing. 

In addition we offer competitive benefits with medical/dental/vision insurance, a 4% 401K employer match, free lunch 3x a week, and so much more! 

Key Qualifications:

Degree/Major: Bachelors or Masters degree with a specialization in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics or equivalent (e.g. Major in CS, Minor in biology).

Python/R: Strong proficiency in either Python (e.g. Pandas, Numpy, SciPy, etc.) or R (tidyr, dplyr, stringr, etc.), and scripting via collaborative notebook editors (e.g. Jupyter / RStudio / VS code)

Linux/Github : Experience working collaboratively in a linux compute environment, as well as maintaining a well-documented code base on Github or similar. 

Data structures: Experience with quickly parsing files into data structures, and their manipulation (e.g. mathematical operations, string/pattern matching etc.), including data frames , matrices, lists, etc. 

Data visualization: Some experience making clear visualizations to effectively communicate complex data using Python (e.g. seaborn or matplotlib) or R (e.g. ggplot, plotly)

What You’ll Learn:

Experience in one or more of the following will be beneficial - but not required! The most important things are (in no particular order) interest, intelligence, and a willingness to work hard (alongside equally hard-working colleagues). Whatever you do or do not know, we are excited to teach you and help you gain experience in areas that you are passionate or curious about:

Large-scale genomic data analysis: Wrangling high-dimensional next-gen sequencing data specifically related to single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) of disease and healthy tissues, and the associated workflows, tools and packages for performing appropriate quality control and statistical analyses of the same (e.g. using Scanpy, Seurat).

Designing graphical user interfaces: Building and hosting fully functional “front-end” web apps (e.g. with RShiny or Dash) that allow users to navigate through and interact with our datasets across multiple projects.

Data Visualization / Communication: Distilling analysis output into visualizations, tabulations, etc that effectively document and communicate results to those with and without a computational background.

Cloud computing: Proficiency working in a linux cloud environment (using AWS & Google Cloud) for data retrieval and storage as part of existing pipelines.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Working at the interface of biology and software engineering, in close collaboration with disease and platform experts to broaden your domain knowledge and exposure to experimental design and strategic planning. 

A grasp of start-up operations and dynamics: Operate in a culture where moving fast and taking calculated risks to drive science forward is the norm.

Entrepreneurship: Exhibit traits such as innovation, resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.

About You:

You want a chance to do your best work, immerse yourself and excel, alongside people who will inspire you and whom you’ll be excited to spend your days with. 

You want to play a key role in an early-stage startup: A fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness, but full of opportunities and excitement.

You are excited to use cutting-edge technology to find the best therapeutic targets, and turn those into drugs. 

You are organized and have a history of managing and collaborating on time-sensitive projects, working across multiple teams.

Our Journey:

Our mission is audacious, and the path will be full of both challenges and excitement. Two things characterize the Gordian experience: 1) We work as a team, with ownership in our own roles and trust in each other. 2) We strive for extraordinary outcomes, and in doing so grow our skills and capability.

Team – Relying on each other begins with transparency. We set clear goals, visibly connecting individuals and teams to our company objectives. This empowers each of us to make autonomous decisions about our work, knowing how they will affect the bigger picture. Our communication happens out in the open and our team is geared towards helping each other out. We provide support for each others’ projects, both experimentally as well as through “pre-mortem” meetings to discuss possible failure modes and experimental design. We give and receive feedback,, share mistakes, and ask for help.

Extraordinary – Every day, we ask ourselves “could this process/outcome be even better?”. Knowing our overall mission, we do what we think helps us make the most progress and we don’t shy away from big challenges or unknown territory, but find a way to excel. Our colleagues are amazing, both at what they do and as people. They inspire us to keep up, to not let them down, and be inspiring in return.

You can dive deeper into our culture here: https://www.gordian.bio/culture/