Associate Scientific Manager - Strain Engineering

Reports to: Associate Director – Strain Engineering

Location: Bangalore

About the Department

nth Bio, our enterprise biology platform, is the first of its kind to help partners of all sizes join us in creating a kinder, greener future through precision fermentation. nth Bio is focused on piloting and scaling our technology to partners across industries, including food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, biologics, textile, and personal care to create products in a new, sustainable way. 

Position Summary

In this position, you will have responsibilities for developing & implementing strain improvement strategies for producing heterologous proteins, and for engineering strains which will become the workhorse for protein production at commercial scale. This will include a) seeking a thorough understanding of the relevant microbial system and state of art technologies in heterologous expression, b) creating hypothesis-driven research proposals, c) conducting and evaluating laboratory-based research, and d) proposing newer strategies in an iterative manner, until project goals are achieved.

What You Will Do

• • Mentoring junior researchers on research techniques and their professional development.
  • Developing productive working relationships with scientists within the department, and other colleagues across R&D and non-R&D departments within the organization
  • Supporting development of protocols, reports and SOPs, and ensuring proper documentation of research conducted in the lab

    Other Functions

  • Perform routine experiments and analyze data to interpret experiment results and report the findings. Give presentations to other members of staff on a regular basis on the progress made.
  • Setting up and helping in maintaining laboratory equipment and bringing in new technology, help the team with cataloguing of chemicals, reagents, and consumables.
  • Stay up to date with the latest advances in biotechnology to advance new techniques, products and processes

What You Bring

We have an opportunity to collaborate to use our unique contributions to create a kinder, greener tomorrow. The dynamic employee we seek is a (Associate Scientific Manager) with these qualifications.

Education, Experience & Other Requirements

To be successful in this position, we expect candidates to have the following technical qualifications:

• • Ph. D/ M.Sc / M. Tech in Biotechnology / Microbiology / Molecular Biology with specialization in genetics and strain engineering of microorganisms such as Yeast (Pichia / Saccharomyces), prokaryotic (Bacillus), Fungus (Aspergillus / Trichoderma / Penicillium) 
  • Ph. D 2 – 4 years of industrial experience or M. Tech/M.Sc 10-12 Years of industrial experience
  • A strong technical background in strain engineering and in manipulating microbes (Prokaryotic – coli, Bacillus strains), Yeast (Pichia pastoris / Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Kluveromyces lactis), Fungus (Aspergillus .sps / Trichoderma. sps / Penicillium. sps), including implementing gene expression and gene targeting/editing strategies to create knock-outs and knock-ins (e.g., CRISPR / other types of gene targeting technologies),

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• • Excellent hands-on and state of the art molecular biology laboratory skillset to create strategies for the construction of plasmids for over expression of proteins and/or genomic integrations of target genes in various organisms, for obtaining high levels of protein expression and/or creating relevant hosts for protein production.
  • Thorough understanding of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic protein synthesis and protein secretory pathways, to design strategies for regulating and optimizing organism’s abilities to over express desired proteins
  • Strong background in developing novel high throughput techniques for culturing and screening strain libraries to identifying high producers, and also experience in developing simple enzyme based assays and basic knowledge in protein purification techniques.
  • Demonstrated technical proficiency, scientific creativity, and ability to work both, independently, and via collaboration with others
  • Other desired skills include, excellent communication, ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, and good aptitude for data analysis and documentation

Language Skills

Skills that enable a person to communicate orally or in writing in English. These include reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

• • Active Listening
  • Speaking Impactfully
  • Proficient Writing
  • Attention to Detail