Scientific Advisor, Computational Protein Design

THIS IS CRADLE

Proteins are the molecular machines of life, used for many therapeutic, diagnostic, chemical, agricultural and food applications. Designing and optimizing proteins takes a lot of expert knowledge and manual effort, through the use of custom computational and biological tools.

Machine learning is revolutionizing this space, by enabling high-fidelity protein models. At Cradle, we offer a software platform for AI-guided discovery and optimization of proteins, so that biologists can design proteins faster and at scale. We are already used by clients across biopharma, biotech, agri-tech, food-tech, and academia.

We're an experienced team of around 75 people. We've built many successful products before and have enough funding for multiple years of runway. We are distributed across two main locations, Zurich and Amsterdam, and are focused on building the best possible team culture.

We offer our employees a very competitive salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits and career progression opportunities.

YOUR ROLE

As a Scientific Advisor within our Customer Success team, you will play a key role in ensuring our customers achieve their protein design goals using Cradle’s AI platform. You’ll act as a trusted partner of biotech and pharmaceutical companies, particularly for biotherapeutics. As part of this role, you’ll assist customers in mapping their program goals and data to Cradle’s capabilities, using our machine learning platform, and maximising the value and impact of our protein optimisation software. For this, you’ll collaborate across Cradle’s engineering, product, and sales teams to ensure a superb customer experience and inform product development to build the most sought-after features.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES

SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY

Work closely with Cradle customers, ranging from medium-sized biotechs to global biotech leaders, to:

• Advise on identifying protein optimisation projects within their portfolios that are best suited to the Cradle platform.

• Help translate scientific goals of projects into objectives for the Cradle platform.

• Deeply understand customer assays/workflows – research modalities/targets as necessary to gain a foundation in relevant concepts, assays and workflows.

• Ensure quality/formatting of customer data is suitable for machine learning

• Train scientists to use Cradle’s platform.

• Collaborate with engineering to ensure our platform outputs optimal protein designs to customers.

• Present reports to help the customer interpret and assess platform outputs and forecasts.

• Provide recommendations to inform go/no-go decisions and devise the most effective strategy for their projects.

PARTNERSHIP

• Build and maintain strong relationships with immediate users of Cradle platform within the customer organization, as well as broader business stakeholders. Keep them abreast of results and impact, on both project and portfolio levels.

• Help existing customers identify further projects and business units that would benefit from Cradle’s platform, and collaborate with the Cradle sales team to enable these projects through relationship expansion.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND VOICE OF CUSTOMER

• Measure and monitor satisfaction of the customers with product as well as service.

• Proactively gather customer feedback, and keep the customers informed as their feedback is then turned into improved features and services.

• Collaborate with product teams at Cradle to guide product development so as to address customer needs.

YOUR QUALIFICATIONS

MUST-HAVES

• PhD in bioengineering, bioinformatics, molecular biology, structural biology, or a related field.

• 5+ years of experience in a scientific role directly related to protein engineering in industrial biotech or biopharma, working with/analyzing/producing activity and biophysical assays data. Your favorite protein modality is one or more of enzymes, antibodies, or natural peptides.

• Proficiency in data analysis using Python and relevant data science libraries (pandas, scikit, scipy, matplotlib, etc.).

• Deep knowledge of the protein engineering R&D process, methods, and tooling.

• Excellent analytical and communication skills, with the ability to translate complex scientific concepts into clear, actionable insights. You think on your feet and are unafraid to ask questions.

• Proven ability to build strong relationships with a variety of stakeholders, including scientists and business leaders.

• Demonstrated interest in AI-guided protein design approaches, awareness of popular open-source LLM and structure-based approaches.

NICE-TO-HAVES

• Demonstrated experience being in a customer-facing roles in the biotech industry, collaborating with external stakeholders.

• You have been the technical lead on projects, managing timelines and deliverables, while keeping stakeholders informed.

• Experience with applying machine learning to protein engineering projects.

• Hands-on experience using APIs.

• Proficiency in SQL.

Our commitment to inclusive hiring

Cradle evaluates all candidates based on merit, regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, or any other aspect of identity. We maintain zero tolerance for discrimination and actively encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

AI disclosure

Cradle uses an applicant tracking system that includes basic AI-assisted features which may generate scores or rankings based on how applications match a job description. These outputs are not used to make or meaningfully influence hiring decisions — all candidates are evaluated through a thorough, human-led review by our recruiting team.

A notice about recruitment scams

Please be aware that scammers are posing as us in order to get your personal details or money. We only communicate via @cradle.bio http://cradle.bio email addresses, we only make job offers after having met you in person at our office in Zurich or Amsterdam, and we never ask you to pay for anything during the interview process.