Research Associate

Reshape Biotech; København; Hybrid; DKK 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Reshape Biotech in Copenhagen is seeking a generalist scientist to build the strain-characterization and analytical foundation for the Hyperscale program. You will develop reproducible workflows, connect genotype to fermentation performance, and troubleshoot strains during scale-up, working in our Østerbro lab with fermentation science, bioengineering, hardware, and data science teams.

This hands-on role combines biology, analytics, and collaboration to deliver data packages used by fermentation

Qualifications

• Molecular biology background with hands-on strain work.
• Experience building and troubleshooting production strains and metabolism.
• Ability to design controlled experiments and analyze complex datasets.

Responsibilities

• Establish reproducible strain-characterization workflows.
• Build datasets linking genotype to fermentation performance.
• Diagnose strain-related causes of poor scale-up performance.
• Deliver characterized strains, methods and data packages for fermentation and modelling teams.
• Collaborate with hardware and software teams to improve automation and data capture.

Skills

molecular biology background

strain engineering

data analysis

experimental rigor

Education

Molecular biology or bioengineering degree

Tools

Python

R

JMP

Job description

Biology is the most powerful technology on the planet. It can feed the world, replace petrochemicals, and grow materials we currently mine or refine. The problem is that turning a promising organism into a working production process still takes 5+ years and millions of dollars, and half the time it fails anyway, not because the biology was wrong, but because making biology viable as a product at commercial scale with current tools is a monumental task.

Reshape builds the operating system for biotech R&D: hardware, software and data science products that capture, structure and analyze data to enable R&D and QC workflows to be much more effective. Hyperscale is our newest and most ambitious bet inside that mission - a full biological engineering suite that takes a product from 96-well plate to full production scale 10x faster and cheaper compared to traditional bioprocess development.

We're building this from the ground up, in-house, in our Copenhagen lab: our own bioreactor fleet across scales, our own data capture layer, and partnering with impressive companies for real strains and processes to prove the whole thing works.

About the role

You will build the strain-characterization and analytical foundation in the Hyperscale program. This is a generalist role, spanning a wide range of responsibilities related to strain engineering and characterization, analytics and support bioprocess development. That means building and characterizing microbial strains and analytical methods that explain—and ultimately predict—fermentation performance across scales.. You’ll be troubleshooting them when they misbehave, and helping us get the data needed to understand exactly what is happening in our fermentations.

What you will do:

• Establish reproducible strain-characterization and assay workflows.
• Build a reference dataset connecting genotype and phenotype with fermentation performance.
• Diagnose at least one important strain-related cause of poor scale transfer.
• Deliver characterized strains, methods, and data packages that fermentation and modelling teams can use directly.
• Collaborate with hardware and software teams to improve experimental automation, data capture, and analytical workflows.
• Contribute to partner projects involving real organisms, processes, and scale-up challenges.

You’ll be shaping what "strain characterization for upscaling" means at Reshape as much as executing it hands-on in the lab. You'll work in a close daily loop with a team spanning fermentation science, bioengineering, hardware engineering and data science, spending a significant amount of your time in our 500 m2 lab in Østerbro.

At a glance:

• Analytics and assays: Support fermentation team with assay development and execution, feeding valuable data points and interpretations across studies.
• Root-cause analysis and interpretation: Study, interpret and analyse the hypotheses for why fermentations fail or underperform across scales in collaboration with the team using the data generated.
• Strain building and troubleshooting: Acquire, construct, modify, and troubleshoot production host organisms, often in collaboration with partners.
• Generalist science and lab ops: We cover a broad range of disciplines with a small team. Helping out across anything that needs to be done in-lab will be key.
• Cross-functional core: Partner daily with the broader science team and our hardware/software teams to close the loop between strain, process, and data capture.

What we are looking for

Someone with a molecular biology or bioengineering background who wants to build technology that will let bioprocess upscaling 10x cheaper and faster. You've built, modified, and analyzed complex processes and strains before and you're comfortable navigating a broad set of problems.

You're an experimentalist who wants to build something from scratch - acquiring & engineering organisms, designing studies, and creating an analytics layer that doesn't fully exist yet - rather than executing an established protocol handed down from someone else. You get excited both about developing methods, but also about getting hands-on in the lab. You think of root causes and think from first principles. You're comfortable with ambiguity, curious and optimistic.

What you bring

• A molecular biology background with hands-on experience building, engineering, or troubleshooting strains and metabolism.
• Familiarity with biochemical analyses, -omics analysis and characterization tools; genomics depth is a plus but not required.
• The ability to design controlled experiments, analyze complex datasets, and draw sound conclusions from imperfect or unexpected results.
• Experimental rigor and a root-cause mindset - you question why and exactly how something failed rather than just documenting that it did.
• Comfort designing your own studies and protocols in an early-stage lab without a mature toolchain.
• Self-driven and collaborative; comfortable in a fast-moving startup with no inherited org chart for this program.

Useful additional experience:

• An understanding of microbial physiology and how strain characteristics influence cultivation and fermentation performance.
• Analytical techniques for biomass, metabolites, substrates, or fermentation products.
• Design of experiments, multivariate analysis, or statistical modelling, Python, R, JMP, or comparable analytical tools.
• Building laboratory workflows in a startup or similarly fast-moving R&D environment.

What the job offers

At Reshape, we’ve built the full stack - hardware, software and data science capabilities, applied aggressively to bioengineering problems. We manufacture in-house and service more than a hundred customers globally from our office in Copenhagen, and we’re investing aggressively to keep expanding our platform capabilities and technology stack. This is the chance to join that build-out and become part of a highly ambitious and skilled team with an optimism about what is possible in biotechnology. You will be given responsibility, freedom and resources to achieve goals within the team and have a big influence on what gets built, working from our own 500m2 lab in the heart of Østerbro.