MRI Engineer

AION Biosciences; St. Louis (MO); On-site; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

AION Biosciences in St. Louis, MO is seeking an MRI Engineer to design and build custom MRI hardware for experiments across cells, tissues, animals, and humans.

You will work with scientists to translate needs into imaging systems, coils, sequences, and pipelines for data analysis. You will develop RF coils, gradient systems, and MRI hardware, while advancing pulse sequences and reconstruction techniques to enable quantitative tissue imaging.

Qualifications

• Strong first-principles thinker who is comfortable working with teammates outside your own domain.
• Generalist wiring: willing to learn across electromagnetics, hardware, biology, signal processing, and experimental design.
• Experience with MRI physics, RF engineering, gradients, magnets, pulse sequence programming, reconstruction, or quantitative imaging is valuable, but obsessive technical ownership matters more.

Responsibilities

• Design and build custom MRI hardware for experiments across cells, tissues, animals, and eventually humans.
• Work directly with scientists to translate informal experimental needs into functional imaging systems, fixtures, coils, sequences, and analysis pipelines.
• Design, fabricate, and test RF coils, gradient systems, low-field magnet assemblies, shielding, phantoms, sample holders, and bench-scale MRI hardware.
• Develop and optimize pulse sequences for low-field and experimental MRI, including relaxation mapping, diffusion, susceptibility, flow, and quantitative tissue-state imaging.
• Build reconstruction and signal analysis pipelines to extract biophysical data from MRI signals: T1, T2, T2*, diffusion metrics, conductivity-adjacent signals, phase, noise, drift, and field inhomogeneity.
• Close the loop between hardware and biology: design the scan, build the system, acquire the data, analyze the signal, and make the tool practical for scientists to use.
• Survey and prototype emerging MRI modalities: low-field MRI, portable MRI, magnetic resonance fingerprinting, quantitative MRI, MR elastography, electrical properties tomography, and hybrid electromagnetic imaging systems.

Job description

At AION, we’re building sci-fi medical devices.

Our mission is to bring aging under full biomedical control. We believe this can be achieved through closed-loop hardware that reads and writes bioelectric states in living tissue using electromagnetic and acoustic fields – a control layer for cell reprogramming that chemistry and gene therapy fundamentally cannot provide.

We’re looking for exceptional engineers to join us in building machines that make aging optional.

The role

As an MRI Engineer at AION, you will:

• Design and build custom MRI hardware for experiments across cells, tissues, animals, and eventually humans
• Work directly with scientists to translate informal experimental needs into functional imaging systems, fixtures, coils, sequences, and analysis pipelines
• Design, fabricate, and test RF coils, gradient systems, low-field magnet assemblies, shielding, phantoms, sample holders, and bench‑scale MRI hardware
• Develop and optimize pulse sequences for low‑field and experimental MRI, including approaches for relaxation mapping, diffusion, susceptibility, flow, and quantitative tissue‑state imaging
• Build reconstruction and signal analysis pipelines to extract biophysical data from MRI signals: T1, T2, T2*, diffusion metrics, conductivity‑adjacent signals, phase, noise, drift, and field inhomogeneity
• Close the loop between hardware and biology: design the scan, build the system, acquire the data, analyze the signal, and make the tool practical for scientists to use
• Survey and prototype emerging MRI modalities: low‑field MRI, portable MRI, magnetic resonance fingerprinting, quantitative MRI, MR elastography, electrical properties tomography, and hybrid electromagnetic imaging systems

You

We value mission alignment, integrity, and ambition over pedigree.

• Strong first‑principles thinker who is comfortable working with teammates outside your own domain
• Generalist wiring: willing to learn across electromagnetics, hardware, biology, signal processing, and experimental design
• Comfortable building real systems, not just simulations or papers
• Experience with MRI physics, RF engineering, gradients, magnets, pulse sequence programming, reconstruction, or quantitative imaging is valuable, but obsessive technical ownership matters more

Details

St. Louis, MO (on‑site).

Equity for the right person.