Gordian Apprenticeship

Are you ready to take on pivotal work that will aid Gordian Biotechnology in pinpointing the most promising therapeutic targets for the development of novel drugs? Join our Apprenticeship Program and help us on our mission to cure age-related disease. We want people to lead longer, healthier lives and wake up every morning, more capable than the day before!

Our Destination:

Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company whose mission is to cure age-related disease and wake up every morning more capable than the day before.

Traditional ex vivo screening methods have failed to produce effective treatments, as age-related diseases have complex causes that include interactions with the aged environment.

To address this problem, Gordian’s platform is the first and only to enable pooled in vivo tests at scale, across different species of diseased animals reflecting patient profiles. We are able to deliver and test hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals, and scale efficacy testing to rapidly prioritize targets and interventions with a clear path toward development (more info on our website).

We are running this discovery engine to ensure an abundance of therapeutic hypotheses can be tested for complex diseases, eventually mapping out the effects of every druggable target across many diseases, and advancing programs both internally and through collaborations with external partners. By working across related sets of indications, we can identify medicines with impacts on age-related multimorbidity.

About the Role:

Our apprenticeship offers a holistic experience in early-stage biotech, enabling you to refine practical laboratory skills while undertaking substantive, hands-on projects that will significantly expand your knowledge base. You'll play a pivotal role in assisting Gordian in identifying optimal therapeutic targets for new drug development.

This opportunity grants you the chance to be at the forefront of rapid innovation, providing you with an insider's perspective into the dynamic landscape of a rapidly growing startup. As we progress further along the drug development pipeline, you’ll be actively involved in utilizing our platform to forecast preclinical and clinical physiological responses through our proprietary in vivo Mosaic screens. As a full-time team member you will collaborate closely with disease specialists, gene therapists, and our platform and data teams, gaining diverse experience within our collaborative matrix team environment.

In this program, you’ll not only build crucial skills and experience as an early-career scientist, but also as a biotech professional, with insight into what it takes to build and grow a biotech company. You will learn about science, and the business of science, through company lunch and learns, monthly industry happy hours (hosted by Gordian), our exclusive speaker series, where you’ll hear from experienced industry/academic experts, and finally through 1:1 time with our founders.

The year-long program will start at the end of June, and our ultimate goal is to give you an experience that will help inform the next steps in your career, whether that is at Gordian or providing you with connections and networking opportunities in both industry and academia that will set you up for whatever path you are passionate about pursuing.

In addition, we offer competitive benefits with medical/dental/vision insurance, a 4% 401K employer match, free lunch 3x a week, and so much more!

Note: Applications open early February and will be closing on April 24th.

What You’ll Learn:

The most important things are interest, intelligence, and a willingness to work hard alongside equally committed colleagues. Prior hands-on experience is a plus, especially the ability to follow protocols carefully, think critically, and understand the “why” behind your work — but whatever your starting point, we are excited to teach you and help you grow in the areas that most excite you.

Depending on the team you join, your apprenticeship experience may include:

• Development Team: Learn how drug discovery programs begin to move toward development through hands-on work with small molecules and proteins. You will gain experience with characterization tools, assay development, chromatography, and high-throughput plate-based workflows that support early pipeline advancement.
• Infrastructure Team: Learn how software and data infrastructure accelerate biotech discovery by supporting large-scale genomic analysis. You will gain experience with production-grade Python, cloud infrastructure, workflow orchestration, containerization, and computational systems that help scientists process and interpret complex in vivo screening data.
• Predict Team: Learn how high-dimensional screening data can be transformed into practical scientific insight through interactive tools and analysis workflows. You will help enable rapid querying, cross-comparison, and interpretation of in vivo perturbation effects across past and ongoing screens.
• Preclinical Team: Learn how promising drug targets are evaluated in animal models of disease using a range of in vivo techniques. You will build practical experience in early-stage drug discovery and develop the foundation to contribute meaningfully to target validation and translational research.
• Molecular Biology Team: Learn how the DNA constructs behind Gordian’s platform are designed, built, and tested. You will gain experience in molecular cloning, DNA and RNA assays, CRISPR/RNAi biology, tissue culture, sequencing-based methods, and platform technology development.
• Single Cell Team: Learn how to generate high-quality sequencing-ready data from complex tissues by isolating cells and nuclei, sorting them, and preparing DNA libraries. You will gain exposure to lab automation, flow cytometry, sequencing workflows, and the tools used to analyze cutting-edge biological data.

Across all teams, apprentices will also gain exposure to startup operations, cross-functional collaboration, and the pace and adaptability required to help build a fast-moving biotech company.

About You:

You want a chance to do your best work, immerse yourself and excel, alongside people who will inspire you and whom you’ll be excited to spend your days with.

You want to play a key role in an early-stage startup: A fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness, but full of opportunities and excitement.

You are excited to use cutting-edge technology to find the best therapeutic targets, and turn those into drugs.

You are organized and have a history of managing and collaborating on time-sensitive projects, working across multiple teams.

You have foundational knowledge of biology and can articulate how this apprenticeship supports your long-term development in the field.

Our Journey:

Our mission is audacious, and the path will be full of both challenges and excitement. Two things characterize the Gordian experience: 1) We work as a team, with ownership in our own roles and trust in each other. 2) We strive for extraordinary outcomes, and in doing so grow our skills and capability.

Team – Relying on each other begins with transparency. We set clear goals, visibly connecting individuals and teams to our company objectives. This empowers each of us to make autonomous decisions about our work, knowing how they will affect the bigger picture. Our communication happens out in the open and our team is geared towards helping each other out. We provide support for each others’ projects, both experimentally as well as through “pre-mortem” meetings to discuss possible failure modes and experimental design. We give and receive feedback,, share mistakes, and ask for help.

Extraordinary – Every day, we ask ourselves “could this process/outcome be even better?”. Knowing our overall mission, we do what we think helps us make the most progress and we don’t shy away from big challenges or unknown territory, but find a way to excel. Our colleagues are amazing, both at what they do and as people. They inspire us to keep up, to not let them down, and be inspiring in return.

You can dive deeper into our culture Here.