Scientific Operations – Associate / Scientist (Contract)

Location: On-site, Cambridge MA
Type: Full-time (40h/week) contractor (3-6 months)
Pay: $30-45/h (pay is based on a 40 hour per week schedule and depends on experience/expertise)
Level: Early Career (2–5 years industry experience)

About the Role

• We’re looking for a hands-on, detail-driven Scientific Operations Associate to help keep our labs running smoothly as we scale.

• You’ll be embedded in day-to-day lab operations to support experiments, uncover edge cases in protocols, and collaborate with both scientists and automation systems to help build the infrastructure behind fast, reproducible science.

• This is a true doer role in an early-stage startup. You’ll wear many hats, move quickly, and help turn messy, real-world lab work into clean, repeatable operations that scale.

What you’ll accomplish with us:

Lab Ops & Daily Execution

• Keep labs organized, stocked, and ready for daily experimentation.

• Assist with lab setup and teardown for protocols and workflows.

• Draft and maintain SOPs, protocols, QA/QC, and operational documentation.

• Coordinate staff scheduling, shared equipment booking, and lab logistics.

• Support EHS requirements, audits, and compliance reporting.

• Maintain chemical and biological inventories, wastestreams, and documentation.

• Help onboard and train visiting operators.
  

Inventory, Procurement & Equipment

• Order reagents, consumables, and equipment; track deliveries and usage.

• Maintain accurate inventory to avoid downtime.

• Support equipment set-up, maintenance, calibration, and vendor coordination.

Technical Excellence

• Assist with scaling, stress testing, and troubleshooting protocols.

• Support benchmarks to validate reproducibility and scalability across lab settings.

• Generate high-quality, structured experimental data for deviations, and edge cases

• Document critical experimental variables for robust handoffs to humans and robots.

• Capture of tacit biological knowledge, from intent to execution.

• Be customer obsessed: initiate, support, and lead initiatives to deliver results to clients.

Requirements:

• Work onsite daily in Cambridge, MA.

• Bachelor’s or higher degree in a scientific or technical field.

• 2–5 years of demonstrated hands-on lab experience with modern wet lab techniques

• A strong desire to improve scientific workflows.

• Experimental design skills with a strong bias toward documentation, reproducibility, and iteration.

• Ability to troubleshoot protocols systematically, with attention to technical and human variability.

• Familiarity with digital lab tools (e.g., ELNs, LIMS, lab automation systems)

• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.

• Clear communicator and collaborative teammate.

• Comfortable working in fast-paced, hands-on lab environments.

Nice to Have

• Startup or early-stage experience preferred; comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration is a must.

• Experience with assay design, development, and optimization

• Coding experience for complex data analysis and statistics (python, R)

• Hands on experience troubleshooting next generation sequencing assays

• Demonstrated experience using AI/ML tools in research, whether for experimental design, data analysis, or predictive modeling.

• Experience working with or supporting internal lab teams as well as direct customer-facing work in partner or external lab environments.