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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 Mosaic Screening pools interventions in living animals, producing datasets with causal validation for hundreds of targets, in the living context of disease and mapped to human patients. This data lets us make the most informed choices on what new ideas for treating complex disease, and move validated targets into drug development. (more info on our website, and in our preprint).
We are running this discovery engine in successive indication areas, currently focused on cardiometabolic, to map the in vivo effects of every druggable target across every relevant organ. We then develop drugs and run clinical trials, both internally and in collaboration with multiple partners. And by pooling the data from each program, we can start to identify medicines with broad impact on the multimorbidity and decline caused by aging.
About the Role:
As our Bioinformatics Apprentice, you'll be instrumental in building, supporting, and maintaining the computational backbone that powers Gordian's discovery engine, while working shoulder-to-shoulder with the scientists whose questions that backbone exists to answer. This role sits at the intersection of biology and software: you'll need an understanding of the biology behind our in vivo screening data, paired with the coding skills to build and maintain the pipelines that turn that data into insight.
This apprenticeship offers a unique experience in early-stage biotech, allowing you to refine technical skills while undertaking substantive projects that expand your knowledge of both science and the business of science. As a full-time team member, you will collaborate closely with disease specialists, gene therapists, and data teams in a collaborative matrix environment. You will gain an insider's perspective into a rapidly growing startup and see how software engineering directly accelerates biotech discovery, taking our platform from concept to delivering insights that drive drug development.
What You'll Learn:
In this track, you will learn how software and data infrastructure support large-scale genomic analysis.
Your experience will include:

• Scientific Grounding: Deepening your understanding of single cell sequencing and molecular biology, you will learn how to translate open scientific questions into abstract computational systems.
• Production-Grade Code: Learning to write robust, scalable code for biological data.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Gaining hands-on experience with Google Cloud and architecting systems for real-time data processing.
• Workflow Orchestration & Containerization: Utilizing tools to manage complex computational systems and process in vivo screening data.
• High-Performance Computing (HPC): Managing HPC clusters to support massive genomic datasets.
• Scientific Insight: Seeing how high-dimensional screening data is transformed into practical insight through interactive tools, in close partnership with our biologists.

Beyond technical skills, you will gain exposure to startup operations and the adaptability required to build a fast-moving company. This includes learning through company lunch and learns, monthly industry happy hours, and 1:1 time with our founders.
About You:
You have a background in either computer science, biology or bioinformatics and are motivated and interested in developing across these areas.
You have a grounding in biology: at minimum, coursework or research experience beyond intro-level classes, ideally with research or coursework that has given you exposure to the biological wet-lab bench, how biological questions get asked, and what methods or approaches are used to unlock answers.
You have real coding experience, importantly in Python, beyond just a single class, whether that's through coursework, research, or personal projects. Additionally, you know how to operate a Linux/Unix based system beyond just a single class whether that's through coursework, research, internship or personal projects.
You're curious and motivated to learn when you don't know the biology or the exact computational approach.
You're genuinely excited to sharpen your biology, cloud and data infrastructure skills (GCP, GitHub, nextflow, and similar). Prior hands-on experience here is a strong plus, but we're looking for real interest and aptitude first and are prepared to teach the software engineering side.
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 organized and have a history of managing and collaborating on time-sensitive projects, working across multiple teams.
You can articulate how this apprenticeship supports your long-term development at the intersection of biology and software.
Note: We're open to candidates at both the undergraduate and master's level. If you're coming in with a master's-level depth of experience in both biology and infrastructure, let us know. There may be a path to a more senior scope within the apprenticeship.
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. We give and receive feedback from a perspective of helping each other grow, share mistakes, and ask for help.
Extraordinary - Every day, we ask ourselves, "How could this process or outcome be even better?" Knowing our overall mission, we do what we think will make the most progress, without asking for permission. We don't shy away from big challenges or unknown territory, we find a way to excel.
Gordian is trying to accomplish something tremendously difficult, and that requires people who care deeply about doing exceptional work. We take ownership of our work, ask every day how we can push our science forward faster, and challenge ourselves, and each other, to continually raise the bar. Holding ourselves and each other to that standard has created an environment where each of us grows into a better version of ourselves.
Doing exceptional work also means building a team that can sustain it. We keep meetings to a minimum so people can focus on the science, encourage open collaboration through hands-on experimentation and "pre-mortem" discussions that strengthen experimental design, and make time to connect over weekly team lunches. We also encourage people to unplug with an unlimited vacation policy. The combination of mission-focus, high expectations, and enabling people to thrive has created an environment that talent finds rewarding, as evidenced by a voluntary attrition of only ~6%/yr.
If this environment sounds appealing, help us bring it to life. We are at an exciting inflection point: applying our technology to create comprehensive atlases of therapeutic targets across multiple diseases, partnering for financial and intellectual support, and translating these insights into new medicines. We want both your ability and personality along for the ride. Our culture is a source of great pride; it represents both who we are and who we wish to be.
You can dive deeper here: https://www.gordian.bio/culture/
The pay range for this role is:
70,000 - 80,000 USD per year (South San Francisco)