Adaptyv
Scientist, Cell-Based & Functional Assays
1mo ago
Europecell-based assaysfunctional assaysprotein assaysantibody assayscell activation assays
Build out cell-based and functional assays to prove antibody or protein functionality.
Responsibilities
- You'll build out cell-based and functional assays at Adaptyv — the work that proves an antibody or protein actually does something: activates or blocks a receptor, triggers signaling, kills a cell, or modulates an immune response. Cell activation assays, reporter systems, potency assays, and antibody functional readouts are the heart of this role.
- This is the most interdisciplinary of our scientist roles. A new functional assay starts as bespoke science and has to become a reliable, automated product. You'll design and run the assays hands-on with the biology team, work with lab automation to make them robust and high-throughput, and work with the software team to capture, model, and interpret the data — turning messy cell-based readouts into clean, comparable results. You'll guide and lead, but the value is in setting up real, working assays, not in managing.
- Develop, qualify, and run cell-based functional assays hands-on: cell activation and signaling, reporter-gene assays, potency assays, and antibody functional readouts (e.g. agonism/antagonism, ADCC/CDC-type functional effects, T-cell activation, cytokine readouts).
- Turn bespoke functional assays into productized, orderable capabilities with defined, reproducible performance.
- Work with the biology team to integrate assays into production workflows, and with lab automation to scale them onto automated systems.
- Partner with the software team to structure and model functional data — dose-response, potency, normalization — and make it interpretable and comparable across runs.
- Own assay robustness: controls, reference standards, troubleshooting, and the quality bar for what we report.
- Advise customers and internal teams on assay design and what the functional data means.
Requirements
- Deep, hands-on experience developing cell-based and functional/potency assays — reporter cell lines, primary cells, flow cytometry, and the realities of making cell assays reproducible.
- Applied industry experience. You've built and run these assays in a production, development, or commercial setting where throughput and reliability mattered — not primarily in an academic research project. This is the core requirement.
- Strong on antibody / protein function — you understand mechanism well enough to design the right assay for the question.
- Builder who moves fast. You like standing up new assay capabilities and productizing them.
- Genuinely interdisciplinary. You're energized by working across biology, automation, and software, and you treat data modeling and automation as part of the assay, not an afterthought.
- Data fluency (scripting, analyzing dose-response and potency data) is a strong plus.
Other
- Adaptyv is building an automated lab thats let AI agents run biology experiments.
- We're entering the era of agentic science where AI models can now design novel proteins, propose hypotheses, and iterate on experimental results. But they can't run the experiments themselves - that's still a manual, months-long process. We're building the infrastructure that gives AI agents access to the physical world.
- We are one of the fastest growing biotech companies, trusted by leading biopharmas, frontier AI labs, and the techbio companies pushing the field forward. This is a rare chance to help advance some of the most important work happening in biotech today.
- Our automated lab is powered by a deep software + hardware stack: lab instruments worth millions of USD reverse-engineered into API-controllable hardware, dozens of devices orchestrated through complex workflows, full observability on everything that happens in the lab, processing pipelines for messy physical-world data, and AI systems that troubleshoot production results and accelerate assay development.
- We’re growing rapidly and are hiring for talented people to scale and support the massive demand for AI-driven wet lab experimentation.
- Location: Lausanne, Switzerland (on-site)
- Type: Full time
- Start date: ASAP
- We are reviewing applicants on a rolling basis.