Senior Antibody Protein Engineer — ML-Driven Discovery

BioSpace; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Group medical, dental, and vision

401(k) plan

Holiday package with 1+ week shutdown

Flexible remote/hybrid work where poss

Job summary

Prellis Biologics is seeking a Senior / Principal Scientist — Antibody Protein Engineering to join our High Throughput Discovery group in Berkeley, CA.

You will drive antibody design and optimization, maturing early hits into development-ready leads, with responsibilities spanning reformatting across modalities, Fc engineering, affinity maturation, developability, library design, and computational design in collaboration with Data Science and AI/ML teams.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Bioengineering, Molecular Biology, Protein Engineering, or related field with equivalent industry experience: Sr. Scientist (PhD + 3-5 yrs); Principal Scientist (PhD + 5+ yrs)

Responsibilities

• Lead antibody engineering with a strong emphasis on late-stage design and optimization to refine and advance lead candidates toward development.
• Core activities:
• Reformat biologics across modalities (scFv, scFv-Fc, minibodies, Fab, VHH, Fc fusions, albumin fusions, TCRm) and assemble multispecifics (knob-in-hole, CrossMab, DVD-Ig, common LC, DARTs)
• Fc engineering — mutations for half-life, effector-function modulation, isotype selection, and bispecific heterodimerization
• Affinity maturation — design focused libraries to improve affinity, kinetics, and specificity
• Polishing & developability — remove chemical liabilities, mitigate aggregation and immunogenicity, humanize when needed
• Screening & library construction — design and execute campaigns (alanine scanning, high-diversity libraries via PCR, Gibson, mutagenesis, oligo-pool synthesis); generate ML training-data campaigns; translate manual workflows to automation
• Computational design — apply structural tools (PyMOL, Schrödinger BioLuminate / Maestro) and partner with Data Science / AI/ML on protein language and structure models (AlphaFold, ESM, RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN, or equivalent)

Skills

Antibody engineering

Protein design

ML in protein design

Cloning & mutagenesis

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentorship

Education

PhD in Biochemistry/Bioengineering/related

Tools

PyMOL

Schrödinger BioLuminate

Maestro

Molecular dynamics

Protein language models

iQue

MACSQuantor

Job description

Prellis Biologics is seeking a Senior / Principal Scientist — Antibody Protein Engineering to join our High Throughput Discovery group in Berkeley, CA.

You will drive antibody design and optimization, maturing early hits into development-ready leads, with responsibilities spanning reformatting across modalities, Fc engineering, affinity maturation, developability, library design, and computational design in collaboration with Data Science and AI/ML teams.