Scientific Writer for Open-Science Life Sciences

Astera Institute; California (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Astera Institute seeks a Scientific Writer to shape and sharpen the scientific content our teams publish—editing research outputs for argument and clarity, drafting blog posts from interviews and raw results, and helping our scientists release work in formats better suited to it than a static PDF. This role reports to Radial leadership.

You will draft and edit, direct figure and design work, and train researchers on what good scholarly communications looks like.

Qualifications

• PhD in life science or equivalent with strong writing/editing background.
• Ability to read methods and code to understand underlying algorithms.
• Proven technical writing with public docs, tutorials, or method write-ups.
• Ability to edit arguments and structure without flattening voice.
• Comfort with Git/GitHub, Markdown, notebooks, and doc toolchains.

Responsibilities

• Edit research outputs and publications for argument and clarity.
• Draft blog posts from interviews and internal results.
• Direct figure/design work and train researchers in scholarly communication.
• Support publication strategy and optimal unit of release for findings.
• Develop interactive/alternative formats (interactive figures, web visuals, notebooks).
• Coordinate with designers, editors, and program teams.

Skills

PhD in life science

Scientific writing & editing

Technical reading of methods/code

Editing range & copy editing

Git/GitHub

Markdown

Jupyter Notebooks

Documentation toolchain

Audience judgement

Open-source software experience

Interactive content (D3/Plotly/Quarto)

Cross-program collaboration

Education

PhD in life science

Tools

Git/GitHub

Markdown

Jupyter Notebook

Sphinx

MkDocs

Quarto

Job description

Astera Institute seeks a Scientific Writer to shape and sharpen the scientific content our teams publish—editing research outputs for argument and clarity, drafting blog posts from interviews and raw results, and helping our scientists release work in formats better suited to it than a static PDF. This role reports to Radial leadership.

You will draft and edit, direct figure and design work, and train researchers on what good scholarly communications looks like.