Scientist, Phylogeneticist
Berkeley, California /
Active Search /
Full time
/ On-site
A Bit About Us:
We are Arcadia Science. Arcadia is a for-profit biology research and development company founded and led by scientists. Our mission is to transform evolutionary innovations into real-world solutions by openly developing more efficient, replicable, and sustainable ways to leverage the biology of diverse organisms.
The Opportunity:
Within Arcadia’s new scientific framework, we have two general buckets: dynamic projects and a centralized platform. Projects are fluid efforts that allow us to ask key biological questions. Our platform leverages broad-scale evolutionary comparisons across diverse species and tool development, which together help us make better hypotheses and test them more efficiently. While the platform shapes projects, projects provide critical test cases for refining the platform.
For the phylogeneticist role, we are seeking a computational evolutionary biologist to creatively engage with and empower project scientists across multiple disciplines, leveraging the candidate’s evolutionary expertise to guide and improve nascent research projects. By contributing to evolutionarily informed experimental design and applying phylogenetic/genomic methods, the phylogeneticist will serve as an invaluable conduit between projects and the platform.
This position will contribute to numerous research efforts and on a rapid time-scale, including generating hypotheses, conducting phylogenomic comparisons, and performing literature reviews and dataset curations. Top candidates will have extensive methodological and practical experience with phylogenomic inference, and the application/development of comparative phylogenetic and genomic methods. Additionally, top candidates will have fluency in multiple coding languages (e.g. R, bash, python), and will easily adapt to conducting analyses on different computational infrastructures such as AWS cloud computing.
The Scientist, Phylogeneticist will be responsible for:
- Interfacing with project scientists at Arcadia, both with and without formal training in evolutionary biology, to encourage and enable comparative evolutionary thinking at the early stages of research development.
- Curating and analyzing macroevolutionary comparative datasets (molecular, phenotypic, ecological, etc) spanning multiple taxonomic scales, from eukaryotes to prokaryotes.
- Building and implementing modules that will serve to extend the functionality (e.g. alignment or tree inference, data processing, etc) of existing phylogenetic workflows in development at Arcadia.
- Creating novel tools for the rapid deployment of phylogenomic comparative analyses for both hypothesis testing and generation.
Education/Experience:
- Ph.D. or equivalent in biology with a focus on evolution, phylogenetics, and computational biology/genomics.
- Cross-disciplinary project and people management experience preferred
- Able to quickly and independently design, perform, and summarize comparative, phylogenetic analyses
- Is highly adaptable and able to start and stop various projects as well as pivot with the organization as it grows
- Has a commitment to sharing scientific processes and results openly and in a timely manner
Successful applicants can expect to be compensated between $125K-150K with benefits and a highly competitive equity offering, depending on experience level. The position will require the individual to be on-site at our Berkeley, California headquarters.
Application Process:
Interested applicants should send a resume and a one-page cover letter that addresses their interest and qualifications for the position.
Arcadia Science is an equal opportunity workplace; we welcome people from all backgrounds and communities. We provide competitive compensation and practical benefits to keep you happy and healthy so that you can do your best work.
Please note that an offer of employment from Arcadia is contingent upon the successful clearance of a reference and background check.
