Computational Vaccine Design Lead

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Company Summary:

What if…you could join an organization that creates, resources, and builds life sciences companies that invent breakthrough technologies in order to transform health care and sustainability?

Flagship Labs 77 (FL77) is an early-stage biotechnology company with an ambitious and exciting mission: to lay the foundation for Global Pathogen Shield™ protective interventions that that can neutralize a wide range of the most dangerous and rapidly evolving infectious pathogen threats. The company is developing a revolutionary approach to this challenge and recruiting a team of top-tier scientists to build what it believes will be a powerful, first-in-category R&D platform.

FL77 is a product of Flagship Pioneering’s venture creation engine, which has also given rise to companies such as Moderna Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MRNA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), and Editas Medicines (NASDAQ: EDIT). Since Flagship’s founding in 2000, the firm has originated and fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $34 billion in aggregate value, 500+ issued patents, and more than 50 clinical trials for novel therapeutic agents.

Position Summary:

This Lead position will join a rapidly growing team to design and characterize novel antigens and evaluate subsequent vaccine responses. The successful candidate will play a key role in formulating and executing on a science & technology strategy that will allow the company to deliver against its near- and longer-term goals. The successful candidate will have expertise in computational approaches to immunogen design, formulating and analyzing massively parallel in vitro and in vivo experiments to drive antigen selection and optimization. This candidate will also collaborate with other experimental and computational scientists to interpret their results in the context of additional, state-of-the-art immune profiling datasets. This individual will join an interdisciplinary and collaborative team at the interface of computational immunology, virology, functional genomics, and vaccine design; they should be comfortable communicating and working with diverse backgrounds in a fast-paced startup environment.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Use high-dimensional datasets and screening platforms in conjunction with computational approaches such as structural modeling and machine learning to drive antigen engineering campaigns
  • Formulate hypotheses and design experiments to evaluate novel immunization strategies
  • Identify and analyze external datasets to support the vaccine design program
  • Collaborate with engineers, computation scientists, and experimentalists to execute on company goals
  • Collaborate with other teams to interpret immunogenicity in context of novel, next-generation immune monitoring tools
  • Help formulate and articulate the company’s science & technology strategy, and monitor progress toward key strategic goals on an ongoing basis
  • Communicate insights and conclusions to colleagues in the scientific and leadership teams

Basic Qualifications:

  • Ph.D. with experience in immunology, bioengineering, or a related field
  • Strong skills in protein engineering using structural or machine learning methods
  • Experience in immunogen design, optimization, and/or selection
  • Strong programming skills in Python and knowledge of software best practices

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with vaccine design against highly variable viruses
  • Experience with machine learning, especially deep learning
  • Experience with antibody characterization and/or immune profiling
  • Experience with NGS data pipelines and analysis
  • Experience with cloud and/or distributed computing
  • Laboratory experience in molecular biology, biochemistry, or immunology
Flagship Pioneering and our ecosystem companies are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
 
Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Flagship Pioneering and its affiliated Flagship Lab companies (collectively, “FSP”) do not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to FSP or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Flagship Pioneering’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of FSP, and FSP will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.