Research Scientist / Engineer, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

Astera Institute; California; On-site; USD 132,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits package

Job summary

Astera Institute seeks a leading Research Scientist or Research Engineer to drive development of a volumetric functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform for awake, behaving primates. You will work across hardware, experiments, and large-scale data analysis with interdisciplinary teammates to advance mesoscale brain imaging.

The role emphasizes hands-on system design, data-driven discovery, and collaboration across engineering, neuroscience, and computation disciplines.

Qualifications

• PhD with 4-12+ years in neuroscience or related field; equivalent expertise considered.
• Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging or comparable high-resolution neuroimaging.
• Experience designing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB.
• Understanding of primate neuroanatomy, image registration, and atlas construction.
• Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing.
• Experience analyzing large-scale imaging/electrophysiology datasets, including ML methods.
• Ability to collaborate with software/hardware engineers and neuroscientists in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize a large-scale volumetric fUSI platform for awake, behaving primates.
• Design and run multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms.
• Develop robust pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, and visualization.
• Analyze large-scale imaging datasets using modern statistics and ML approaches.
• Register data across sessions and animals to build brain atlases.
• Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other recording modalities.
• Collaborate with engineers to improve hardware and acquisition software.
• Mentor technicians and junior scientists; contribute to hiring and lab culture.
• Publish discoveries with Open Science and contribute to open datasets/docs.

Skills

Python

MATLAB

Neuroscience

Machine learning

Image processing

Data analysis

Mentorship

Education

PhD in neuroscience

Tools

fUSI hardware

Image reconstruction pipelines

Job description

About Astera

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.

Company Overview

Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

Position Summary

You will develop Astera Neuro's volumetric fUSI platform for primates, working across hardware, experimentation, and computational analysis. From implementing the imaging system and designing experiments to analyzing large-scale datasets and building functional brain atlases, you'll help create one of the world's most advanced platforms for mesoscale imaging of the primate brain. You'll work alongside engineers, software developers, neuroscientists, veterinarians, and external collaborators in an interdisciplinary team focused on creating technologies that enable fundamentally new neuroscience. Animal wellbeing is foundational to this work, supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff and rigorous welfare standards.

What You’ll Do

• Build, validate, and optimize a large-scale volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake, behaving primates.
• Design and execute multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms and complementary recording and perturbation techniques.
• Develop robust computational pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, registration, quality control, statistical analysis, and visualization.
• Analyze large-scale functional imaging datasets using modern statistical and machine learning approaches.
• Register imaging data across sessions and animals to generate high-resolution anatomical and functional brain atlases.
• Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other neural recording and perturbation modalities to create comprehensive maps of brain function.
• Collaborate closely with engineers and software developers to continuously improve imaging hardware and acquisition software.
• Mentor research technicians, and at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists and engineers; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.
• Publish scientific discoveries using Open Science and FAIR principles, and contribute to open datasets, software, and technical documentation.

Who You Are

Required

• PhD with 4-12+ years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrated expertise will also be considered.
• Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging, or with comparable high-resolution neuro imaging technologies.
• Experience designing and executing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI.
• Strong scientific programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB.
• Understanding of primate neuroanatomy, image registration, and atlas construction.
• Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing.
• Experience analyzing large-scale imaging, electrophysiology, or multimodal neuroscience datasets, including with machine learning or computational neuroscience methods.
• Ability to work at close quarters with software engineers, hardware engineers, and neuroscientists in a fast-moving, multi-team environment.
• Track record of mentorship and technical leadership.

What We Value

• Conviction that the brain's internal model can be understood in full, and recognition that getting there requires a kind of science no single academic lab can do. We are betting on scale, on deep collaboration across science and engineering, and on open sharing of ideas and expertise in a full-stack environment.
• Appetite for building a capability that does not yet exist. You enjoy building new experimental systems as much as answering scientific questions, and you are comfortable moving between hardware, software, and data analysis.
• Willingness to be held to an engineering standard. Our decisive tests are write-in experiments: constructing a specific percept, thought, or internal state, not merely decoding one. What we cannot build, we do not understand.
• Comfort building on shared infrastructure rather than private projects. Recordings and perturbations will be registered onto a common whole-brain functional and anatomical atlas, and datasets are designed to stitch across sessions, animals, and paradigms.
• Commitment to open science. We will release tools, data, and methods, and we aim to create a new dynamic of rapid, open exchange in neuroscience.

Why Join Us

We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist or Research Engineer to lead the development of a next-generation functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform for whole-brain imaging in awake, behaving primates. This is an opportunity to build a unique experimental capability from the ground up and generate datasets that could redefine how large-scale neural activity is measured. If you enjoy designing sophisticated experimental systems, solving challenging technical problems, and combining engineering, neuroscience, and computation into a single platform, we'd love to hear from you.

Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion! Compensation Range: $120K - $220K