General Prism Job Application

About Astera

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress.

We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match.

We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.

About Prism

Prism is a program within Radial, the basic life sciences division of the Astera Institute. We are making protein motion measurable, predictable, and actionable by building open infrastructure for studying protein dynamics directly from experimental data. Function emerges from the ensemble of conformations a protein adopts and how it moves between them, and we are rebuilding the structural biology stack around that premise: data collection, modeling, representation, and interpretation.

We work at the interface of experimental structural biology (crystallography, cryo-EM), machine learning, computational biophysics, and open scientific tooling. Our team spans computational biologists, ML researchers, software engineers, and program staff, collaborating across Radial, Astera, and partner institutions.

• Submit your CV and one paragraph telling us what you can contribute to Prism
• We review submissions on a rolling basis
• If there is a fit now or in the near future, we will reach out
• We will only respond if we are interested in exploring further
• Role categories We're Actively Building Around
• Computational and data science
• Diffraction data processing and structural data pipelines
• Multiconformer and heterogeneity analysis from large datasets
• Data standards work (mmCIF and related)
• Macromolecular ensemble metrics
• Machine learning research for macromolecules and biophysics
• Representation learning for protein dynamics
• ML on raw experimental data rather than processed structures
• 3D vision and geometric deep learning backgrounds especially welcome
• Dataset generation and open release
• Designing and running campaigns to generate large structural datasets
• Partnering with external collaborators to open and standardize existing datasets
• Bridging experimental facilities, data producers, and the open-science community
• Software and infrastructure engineering
• Scientific data infrastructure, pipelines, and tooling
• Open-source release engineering, reproducibility, and developer experience
• Program and operations
• Program management, scientific coordination, communications
• Open-science publishing and community building

What We Look For Across All Roles

• Familiarity with protein biophysics and the experimental methods that generate structural data
• High agency: you identify what needs doing and move it forward without waiting for direction
• Ability to drive projects and people, including collaborators outside your reporting line
• Comfortable owning a problem end-to-end and unblocking collaborators
• Strong commitment to open science and public-good infrastructure
• Comfort working at the boundary between disciplines
• Bias toward shipping, iteration, and rapid feedback
• Clear written and verbal communication
• Track record of independent work inside collaborative teams

Logistics

• Location: in-person at Astera in Emeryville, California
• Astera is a 501(c)(3) private operating foundation
• This is not an application to a specific posted role; we will reach out only if there is a fit