Here's the tl;dr:

• We are on a mission to make programming biology easy. We provide biologists with the software, machine learning & services to discover, design and optimise enzymes and their cell-factories to ultimately produce almost anything.
• We're an experienced team. We have built many successful products before and we have raised enough funds to have plenty of runway for the years to come!
• We're focused on building the best possible team culture. We're distributed across two locations, and are flexible about when and where we work.
• We offer top of the market salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits from health and wellbeing, financial, to training and career progression opportunities.

This is Cradle

Cradle helps teams to engineer proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. We are bridge builders who bring together the best of machine learning, synthetic biology, developer tools, and user experience design. Our mission is to enable a world where most of the products around us can be easily made and degraded biologically using a cell-factory instead of (petro-)chemicals, plants or animal agriculture.

What we're looking for

We are looking for a motivated student to do a ≥6-month MSc internship in our BioEngineering team. This team is responsible for developing and running high-throughput workflows for building DNA libraries, expressing and purifying proteins, and running enzyme characterisation studies (e.g. enzyme assays). Our wet-lab infrastructure enables much faster, scalable, and cost-effective experimentation, and works hand in hand with our machine learning algorithms. Next to more established methods, we're developing workflows that are based on fundamentally different techniques than currently is mainstream.

Since we want to help the broader bio community, we aim to make the workflows, protocols, materials, and tools we develop in our lab public (see e.g. our blog post and webinar). That's also the intention for the results coming from this internship.

During your internship, you will get unique exposure to our high-throughput workflows for DNA assembly, sequencing, protein expression and purification. Your project will focus on enhancing a specific step within these workflows. For example, you might develop improved methods for plasmid quality control using Nanopore sequencing, build and validate a new series of expression plasmids, or develop high-throughput in vitro transcription and translation workflows. If you are passionate about molecular biology, enjoy detailed laboratory work, and are driven to innovate in biotechnology, we would love to hear from you.

This is a MSc internship with a minimum duration of 6 months and a start date somewhere in the 4th quarter of 2024 or 1st quarter of 2025.

Need-to-Haves

• BSc in molecular biology, biochemistry, enzymology, metabolic engineering, biophysics, or related fields
• Enrolled at a MSc studies
• Previous wet lab experience of >3 months.
• Hands-on experience with standard cloning techniques.
• Excitement to learn, contribute, and drive innovation in an early stage startup environment. Having an appetite for its ambiguity and fast pace.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills in English. Proactively sharing results, successes and challenges in a cross-functional environment.
• Ability to run multiple projects simultaneously while ensuring that process steps are documented, and physical / digital data are organized.

Application requirements

• Please submit your resume along with a letter of recommendation from a professor or principal investigator at your university or a previous internship.
• This position is only available for citizens from EU/EEA or Switzerland
• The deadline for submitting applications is September 15, 2024.

Learning more about the BioEngineering team

If you'd like to learn a bit more before applying, check out blog posts from our team (link 1, link 2) or watch the webinar we did with Benchling (link).

Cradle helps biologists design improved proteins in record time using powerful prediction algorithms and AI design suggestions.

We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. Our mission is to ultimately help more people build with biology and replacing traditional farms and factories for a more sustainable world.

You will be joining a high-growth, highly ambitious startup with an experienced founding team, whose motivation is building a more sustainable world using biology. We are backed by some of the most well known investors and industry veterans. Joining us now means you will be getting in on the ground floor; you will have a significant impact on how we shape the company, and success will mean an outsized reward.

Did we pique your interest? We'd love to hear from you. Please use this form to apply directly.