Senior Research Associate – High Throughput Screening and Assay Development

Location: SF/Bay Area
Position: Full-time
Team: Discovery Biology

The Opportunity

Ephla Bio is building the experimental infrastructure behind peptide HLA binder discovery and specificity prediction. The work spans a yeast-based display platform, mammalian cell line engineering, immune assays, and the high-throughput NGS readouts that tie them together.

We are looking for a hands-on biologist to run the bench side of that work. You'll move between yeast and mammalian systems, build and sequence libraries, and own the assay optimization that makes everything reproducible. In this role, you would be helping to build workflows and making them robust, scalable, and documented.

What You’ll Do

Molecular biology:

• Design and build high throughput libraries for cell-based screening

Cell culture and cell line engineering

• Maintain mammalian suspension and adherent lines

• Generate custom cell lines via transfection, transduction, or editing, and characterize them

• Culture, transform, and maintain engineeredS. cerevisiaestrains; strain construction including integrations, marker swaps, and CRISPR deletions; display induction and selection

NGS readout

• Own the end-to-end NGS pipeline, including amplicon generation, indexed library construction, QC (Qubit/TapeStation/qPCR), pooling, and submission

• Leverage lab automation to scale up sample prep

Assay Development

• Develop and run internal immune efficacy assays on hits from pooled screening

Who You Are

• BS/MS in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, Bioengineering, Immunology, or related field, with 3+ years of hands-on lab experience (industry or academic)

• Strong aseptic technique and independent cell culture experience

• Comfortable with core molecular biology: cloning, PCR, plasmid design, library construction

• Hands-on NGS library prep experience

• Organized record keeping; you treat documentation as part of the experiment

• Comfortable in an early-stage environment where protocols are still being written

• Excellent experimental design and bench troubleshooting

• Strong communication and collaboration skills in a fast-paced, interdisciplinary environment

What Sets You Apart

• Lab automation: liquid handlers, fluid dispensers, plate-based semi- or full automation

• CRISPR genome editing in mammalian cells or yeast

• Immunology background: T cell assays, pMHC reagents, flow-based immune readouts

• Yeast genetics or yeast surface display experience

• Experience preserving library representation in pooled or barcoded workflows

About Ephla Bio

Ephla Bio is an interdisciplinary team of engineers, immunologists, and bench scientists, focused on unlocking peptide–HLA targets for next-generation precision immunotherapies. We offer a high-trust environment where scientists own their work end-to-end and build tools that directly shape patient outcomes.